


Things that keep us apart (and bring us together)

by myqueenyoursavior



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Banter, F/F, Flirting, Fluff, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-03 05:22:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 23
Words: 89,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15812250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myqueenyoursavior/pseuds/myqueenyoursavior
Summary: The ultimate sacrifice made by Emma in order to save Regina from the darkness puts everything into perspective, forcing the two women to face their feelings once and for all. Will they be able to reach and keep their happily ever after; or will they succumb to the forces that threaten to tear them apart?Set roughly at the beginning of Season 5, following only some aspects of canon. The events of the first four Seasons diverge from canon a bit, said differences will be clear in the story.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [True Love's Peck | fanart](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15822777) by [Jajs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jajs/pseuds/Jajs). 



The only thing filling her ears was the sound of her beating heart.  
It was pounding so hard in her chest, it felt almost as if the mostly red muscle was trying to escape from her rib cage. Escape and run after the woman who had just disappeared into thin air in front of her eyes.  
Deep down she felt the exact same urge, but she couldn’t voice it. Not now. Not ever.  
How could she dare do that anyway? ‘You have worked too hard to have your happiness destroyed,’ that’s what the other woman had told her moments before sacrificing herself to the darkness. The same darkness that was trying to take an hold of her. Emma had sacrificed herself for her happiness; or at least what she thought was her happiness. How could she tell her now that she had been wrong? That the arms currently wrapped around her body weren’t the ones she longed for at random moments of the day? She had disappeared into thin air to who knows where. The place she had disappeared to was definitely not in our world. She didn’t exactly know how, but she was sure of it. Something in the pit of her stomach told her so.  
  
“How could she be so stupid?” she said at last, freeing herself from those arms that felt so suffocating.  
  
“Regina!” scolded her one of the two idiots; she couldn’t tell which of the two.  
  
“Well, there had to be another way,” she continued. She was mostly talking to herself, but that wasn’t obvious to everyone else present.  
  
“There wasn't,” now it was clearly Snow’s voice ringing in her ears; the obnoxious sound mixing together with the still pounding sound of her heart “That thing was going to kill you. She saved your life.”  
  
“Don’t you think I know that?” she protested, trying to hold back tears. Nobody had ever made that kind of sacrifice for her before; she didn’t know what to do with all the contrasting emotions.  
  
“And now she is the... Dark One,” came Henry’s voice out of nowhere, making her snap completely out of that haze she had been in since the darkness had started enveloping her body.  
  
“Now she is a problem for all of us,” she said without thinking, she didn’t even know why she clung so hard to that tough facade.  
  
“She is still good,” Snow told her, in a voice that sounded more like a cry for help than an affirmation.  
  
“I hope so. It's not like she rode off on a unicorn. She got sucked up by a vortex of evil!”  
  
Her own words causing her mind to once again focus on how big the sacrifice had been, only to be interrupted by a low gasp escaping Henry’s mouth as everything settled in in his mind as well. She looked at her son’s frightened expression, and approached him, enveloping him in a half protective, half comforting hug.  
  
As she was occupied with Henry, Hook had taken a hold of the dagger and had tried to summon Emma to them, with no obvious result.  
  
“Put that thing down before you hurt yourself, guy-liner. I thought you knew the dagger's rules?” she told him, an arm still wrapped around her son’s shoulders.  
  
“With it, I can summon the Dark One from any corner of the world.”  
  
“Well, there's your answer. She's not in this world,” she pointed out what she had felt not too long before.  
  
“Whose fault is that?” Hook asked, his voice raising drastically, while he was quickly getting closer.  
  
Regina looked down for a moment, not in defeat, but simply to try to gain control over the tears that were so hard trying to escape her eyes. Her whole being was still trying to escape. Escape and find Emma.  
In a split moment decision she let go of Henry, looked up, and poofed herself away. She needed at least a moment to breathe on her own, before she could go back to everyone else. Whether they wanted to blame her or wanted her to find a solution - because it was always one of the two things - she needed to take a moment to just think.  
What she hadn’t predicted, of course, was her son noticing her glistening eyes. He had grabbed her arm just in time as he had noticed she was about to poof away.

 

* * *

  
  
Now they were both standing at the docks, the full moon illuminating them and the benches behind them.  
  
“Henry?” she exclaimed, without really knowing what to say next. A hand placed on her own stomach: the ultimate sign of her increasing worry and nervousness.  
  
They looked at one another in the eye, almost as they were having a staring contest. That until Henry gave her his best puppy eyes that reminded her so much of Emma.  
  
“What?” she questioned.  
  
“You don’t have to act all tough with me, you know?” he told her, in a tone of voice that resembled her this time “it’s okay to cry, you taught me that.”  
  
“Henry, I don’t know what you are talking about,” she almost protested, bringing her hand to her hip now.  
  
“Okay,” Henry said softly “can I ask you something?”  
  
She gulped loudly. If what he had told her seconds before wasn’t proof enough, now this definitely was. Her son... their son... had seen right through her. She simply nodded in response.  
  
“Are you in love with ma?” he asked, tilting his head slightly.  
  
“I...” she started, it was a simple enough question, considering she knew the answer, but she still wasn’t ready to fully voice it “I’m not sure, sweetheart.”  
  
He nodded in a way that made her realize just how much her son knew her. And just how much he had gotten traits from both his mothers. He had taken the best parts from both nature and nurture: he was as smart as she was, and he shared the same super power as his other mother. At least he did when it came to the two people he shared True Love with that far in his life.  
  
“Maybe I am,” she conceded.  
  
“That’s all I needed to know for Operation Unicorn,” he said smugly.  
  
“What’s that?” She asked, widening her eyes a bit “and why unicorn?”  
  
“Our own new Operation to get ma back,” Henry replied with a smile “and unicorn because of what you said before.”  
  
“I like it,” she said nodding, rethinking of her own previous comment, before widening her eyes a bit more this time “can we not...”  
  
“... mention it to the others?” he finished for her “don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me.”  
  
She smiled softly, realizing only then that her heart had started beating at a normal pace. Only two living people had that effect on her: one was standing in front of her, the other she was hopefully going to find soon enough.  
  
“Shall we?” she asked, after drying her face from the tears she had finally allowed to let fall.  
  
“Let’s go,” he agreed, placing a hand on her shoulder and squeezing lightly.

 

* * *

 

  
As she poofed them both back in the middle of Main Street, the others were staring at them in shock. They didn’t seem to have moved an inch.  
  
“Where did you go?” asked Snow.  
  
“It was bloody time you got back,” Hook exclaimed in his ever so unpleasant voice.  
  
“I needed to collect my thoughts,” that much she could give away “away from the yelling guy-liner.”  
  
“And what did you conclude, your majesty?”  
  
“That I... we,” she said looking back at Henry by her side “need to get Emma back.”  
  
“And why would it be your job to do so?” Hook almost spit out, advancing once again. She could almost smell the rum in his breath at that point.  
  
“Because...” Regina was lost for words. She wanted so much to use a good remark about how Emma had sacrificed herself for her to make the stupid pirate shut up once and for all; but not knowing how the other woman actually felt, petrified her on the spot.  
  
“Because I started ‘Operation Swan’,” said Henry in a matter of fact tone “and I decide who is in it and who isn’t.”  
  
Hook looked at her son with mad eyes, almost getting too close to intimidate him. Almost being the key word. He immediately took a step back. It hadn’t been because of sudden remorse, though. What had stopped him was the sight of Regina conjuring a fireball in her hand. She needed to make it clear that, if he had taken another small step toward Henry, he would have been dead before he could say ‘what’s a shower?’  
  
“Can’t we all work together?” whined Snow from a few feet away “we all have the same goal after all.”  
  
They all simultaneously looked back at her and mumbled something in agreement.  
  
“Especially you two,” continued Snow.  
  
Regina and Hook looked back at each other; she saw a hint of something in his eyes she couldn’t put her finger on. It was gone before she could analyze it further.  
  
They both reluctantly nodded in the other’s direction, agreeing not to fight anymore. Or at least for the time being.  
  
“I know what we need right now,” exclaimed Snow with too much enthusiasm.  
  
“Don’t say find the silver lining, because I’ll...” said Regina, not knowing how to truly finish the sentence.  
  
“No,” said Snow, giving her a curious look “we need to get some sleep.”  
  
Snow seemed to have the absurd idea that she was in charge, and Regina was letting her believe that; at least for the night.  
She needed to find a strategy on her own, without being constantly interrupted by speeches about getting along, holding hands, and skipping together on green fields.

 

* * *

 

  
  
After agreeing on meeting at Granny’s first thing in the morning, they all said goodbye and walked towards different directions.  
  
Regina, of course, was walking with Henry. She hadn’t let go of him yet; her arm firmly wrapped around his shoulders. After a bit, she removed it from there, and took Henry’s hand in hers.  
  
“Do you think we’ll find her?” he asked, the last person she expected having doubts.  
  
“I think we will,” she reassured, squeezing his hand in hers, trying not to give away her nervousness again.  
  
“Me too,” Henry replied, squeezing her hand back.  
  
They walked the rest of the way in complete silence. That, until Regina used her key to open the front door.  
  
“I’ll see you in the morning.”  
  
“Are you sure you don’t want me to stay up a bit longer?”  
  
“Yes, Henry. You need some rest.”  
  
“Okay, then,” he agreed. He was worried, but didn’t want to get in the way of his mom’s plans. Because he knew she was up to something “see you tomorrow. Love you, mom.”  
  
He placed a kiss on her cheek, and started walking toward the stairs.  
  
“Love you too, Henry,” she replied immediately. Then waited till she heard the sound of a door closing, to finally let it all out. She leaned with her forehead against the front door’s frame, letting go a long and painful sigh. New tears silently streaming down her face. Her hands wrapping around the frame, her short nails digging into the wood.  
  
A short moment later, she straightened her back, tried to recompose herself a bit, then she made her way inside the house. As she was about to close the door, she heard a sudden noise behind her. She turned around slowly, her heart in her throat, both scared and hopeful.  
  
“Regina,” said Robin, the moment she had completely turned around.  
  
“How long have you been there?” she questioned, her heart sinking down. She had hoped for that short moment... hoped it was someone else.  
  
“I followed you here, I was hoping...” he said in his monotone voice.  
  
“What?” Regina asked in a voice that she knew was probably too harsh, but what did he expect? “What were you hoping?”  
  
“I was hoping I could help you get your mind off things,” he replied, making a weird face that made her realize he was probably trying to be flirty. It was surely an improvement from his usual constipated expression, but definitely far from the smirk he was going for.  
  
“Things?” She repeated, before turning around toward the house and taking a few steps forward. She brought her hand to her face, pinching the bridge of her nose. Her fingertips getting wet from the tears she had just shed. She then turned around again, her hand on her hip, and once again said: “things?”  
  
“Look,” Hood said as he got inside the mansion “I know you are worried about your best friend, but...”  
  
Regina scoffed loudly at the words ‘best friend,’ making him stop mid sentence.  
  
“What’s that all about?”  
  
“Nothing.”  
  
“Don’t lie to me, Regina. I’m your soul mate.”  
  
That last part got her scoffing again.  
  
“You really think pixie dust is going to determine who I love?” she said drily “I gave you a chance because Tinker Bell made me feel guilty about ruining your life. But this? This isn’t the real thing.”  
  
“What are you saying?” he asked, getting closer, raising his voice; finally noticing the tears in her eyes “Are you...”  
  
“Mom?” called Henry from the middle of the stairs, interrupting what Hood was about to ask “everything okay there?”  
  
“Yes, sweetheart,” she replied, her voice unmistakably shaky.  
  
Henry walked all the way down the stairs, and reached those last three steps in the foyer. Regina turned around to look at him, and then nodded in his direction.  
  
“Robin was just about to leave,” she said, turning around.  
  
The man simply looked at them both in shock, then left. Regina used her magic to gently close the door as he did so, and locking it as well.  
  
“Are you sure you are okay?” her son questioned again.  
  
“I am,” she replied, approaching him.  
  
“Okay,” he smiled softly “what are you going to do now?”  
  
“Trying to find a solution to get to Emma.” There was no point in lying to her son and tell him she was going to bed. “I’m going to check a few books before going to sleep.”  
  
“Don’t stay up too late,” Henry repeated what his mom had always told him when he wanted to stay up to read a good book.  
  
“Goodnight, Henry,” she smiled, rethinking back to the same memories.  
  
“‘Night, mom,” he replied, before planting another kiss on her cheek.  
  
Once she heard the sound of his door closing for the second time that night, she directed herself toward her study. She needed to find a solution, and she needed to do that fast. She was hoping she could do as her son had told her and go to sleep early enough. She wanted to have as much energy as possible for whatever the next day had in store for her.  
  


* * *

  
  
She spent the first ten minutes with an untouched glass of apple cider in her hands, thinking about how Snow could just go to sleep with her daughter turning into the Dark One. And most importantly missing.  
It felt like that time Emma had decided to get rid of her magic and the two idiots were okay with it. It once again felt as if she were the only one actually caring about Emma. Excluding Henry, of course, who was still just a kid. It felt so absurd that she was the person that cared so much about the woman. Especially considering how at the very beginning she really hated her. How that very first night the stranger Henry had brought home claiming she was his birth mother had sat on the exact spot she was currently sitting on.  
That’s what occupied the next ten minutes: reminiscences of their relationship, and how much it had changed over the years.  
Then finally, she had gotten up to look through the few magic books on her bookshelves, leaving her still untouched cider on the coffee table.  
She was really hoping to find something in what she had at home. The alternative would’ve been to ask Belle for help. Not that she minded asking her, but she was sure the bookworm had her hands full with the ex Dark One. Maybe one day they could form an exclusive group, she thought. One reserved to people in love with Dark Ones; or better yet, ex Dark Ones. She shook her head at her own thought, and got to work.  
  
One hour or so later, a book open on her lap, she leaned back into the couch.  
‘I am in love with Emma Swan,’ she thought, over and over. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known for a while now. She had known for a bit. It had sneaked up on her slowly, sure; but she did know before. The ultimate sacrifice Emma had made for her just hours before, had simply made it all sink in. ‘I am in love with Emma Swan,’ she thought again ‘the woman who eats like a child, is always clumsy, and is constantly touching stuff she shouldn’t touch.’  
  
Thinking of stuff people shouldn’t touch, her thoughts went back to the dagger with the new Dark One’s name engraved on it. Snow had decided her and Charming should have been the ones keeping it for the night. It was better than the guy-liner, of course; she just wasn’t convinced that leaving it to them was a good choice either. At the very first opportunity they would have surely used it for the wrong reasons.  
  
That last train of thought somehow made her mind go to something she had read once when she had started learning magic. She closed the book in her lap, walked to the bookshelf to put it back in his place, and grab another one. She quickly flipped through this new book, finding exactly what she was looking for. She smiled to herself for finally having found a solution, and it was only 1:30 am. She sat down on the couch again, bringing the open book to her chest, still smiling to herself. If everything was going as planned, she’d be able to see Emma the next day. She fell asleep in that position soon after, with that as the last thing on her mind.  


* * *

 

That’s exactly where Henry found her the next morning. He knew they were supposed to meet with the others at 7 am, but he had woken up at 6:15 unable to go back to sleep. He had passed by his mom’s bedroom to go to the bathroom, noticing the door was wide-open. He immediately knew where to go check next; and that’s where he found her, on the couch, sleeping with a book on her lap.  
  
“Mom?” he said in a hushed voice.  
  
“I’m awake!” She snapped out of her sleep, and jumped off the couch, making the book fall on the ground.  
  
“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” she questioned at the sight of his son still in his pajamas “did something happen? What time is it?”  
  
“I couldn’t go back to sleep,” he told her, scratching the back of his head “It’s 6:25.”  
  
She sank back on the couch, letting out a loud sigh. She was annoyed at herself because she had planned on getting up earlier to go over what she had found. At some point, tiredness had probably taken over all the adrenaline from the previous night, and she had inevitably fallen into a deep sleep.  
  
“Did you find anything useful?” her son asked her hopeful, taking the book off the floor, and sitting down next to her.  
  
“I did,” she smiled lightly, remembering her discovery.  
  
She took the book he was handing her, and showed him everything that they needed to do in order to get to his other mother.  
  
“And you are sure we can find it in Gold’s shop?”  
  
“Positive.”  
  
“What are we waiting for then?”  
  
“Your grandma. We have to wait till it’s time to meet at Granny’s,” she replied with a slight roll of her eyes “I’m not going to spend a single minute with Snow going on and on about how we should’ve waited for her.”  
  
“Fair enough,” he said with a chuckle. The general mood in the room was definitely better than it was the night before; mainly because of the fact that they had seemed to have found a solution.  
  
Neither of them dared to admit they were anxious and afraid of what they were going to find the moment they were once again reunited with Emma.  


* * *

  
   
At 7 am sharp, Regina and Henry walked into the diner. The whole place was completely empty. Granny was probably in the kitchen, the noises coming from it confirmed that. They silently sat at one of the booths, and waited.  
  
“Can I get you anything?” Granny asked them a couple minutes later from behind the counter.  
  
“Hot cocoa,” promptly replied Henry “with cinnamon, please.”  
  
Regina shook her head no.  
  
“You should get something,” suggested Granny, an unusual worried expression on her face. They had come a long way since the Enchanted Forest days, sure, but they had never been anything other than acquaintances.  
  
“A tea then,” she replied, squinting her eyes “thank you.”  
  
“Be right back!”  
  
‘Can anyone see through me now?’ she asked herself ‘did the sacrifice the idiot made for me, made it all clear to everyone in town?’  
  
“What’s wrong?” Henry asked her as he noticed the increasing furrowing of her eyebrows.  
  
“Nothing, I-“  
  
Before she could finish the sentence, or even think it through in her head, the two idiots entered the diner. They were followed close behind by the already sulking pirate, or would it be ‘still,’ considering he always had an excuse to do so? Her eyes followed the trio: Hook was about to sit at one of the stools; Snow and Charming were approaching their table.  
  
“You brought the baby too?” Regina exclaimed as she registered the fact that Snow was carrying baby Neal in her arms.  
  
“So?” she asked, titling her head toward her, while gently caressing her son’s back. Slightly bothered by Regina’s comment, she decided to sit next to her grandson.  
Charming shook his head at the scene, and sat next to Regina.  
  
“So?” Regina repeated, as they were sitting down “You can’t bring a baby to stuff like that!”  
  
“You are bringing Henry.”  
  
“Hey,” he protested, only to be immediately silenced by both his mom’s and his grandma’s looks toward him.  
  
“Don’t we have more important things to discuss?” Regina pointed out; she would have loved to throw all her tension toward Snow, but didn’t want to waste a single moment more either.  
  
“Of course,” she replied.  
  
Before they could get to the reason why they were there, their attention was caught by the door opening once again. They all turned around: it was Belle carrying four books. She spotted them at the booth, and started walking toward it at the same time as Granny was bringing them their order.  
  
“Can I get you anything?” she asked the Charmings.  
  
“A tea, please?” replied Belle from behind her.  
  
“Belle?” Granny jumped, luckily she had already place the two mugs on the table “I didn’t see you there!”  
  
“Sorry?” she said in a sheepish voice, involuntarily dropping a book.  
  
“It’s nothing, just be more careful,” she said, then turned to the table again “So?”  
  
“I’d like to see the menu first,” said Snow. Charming nodded in agreement.  
  
Granny nodded too, then rolled her eyes in Regina’s direction; then she walked back into the kitchen.  
  
Belle finally approached the table, placing all the books on it, including the one she had dropped on the floor.  
  
“What’s that?” asked Henry.  
  
“Some books I thought could help us find Emma.”  
  
“Actually…” he started, then looked at his mom.  
  
“I already found something that I’m sure could help us.”  
  
“You did?” asked Belle.  
  
“When?” asked Snow at the same time.  
  
“I did,” she replied, looking at Belle with a small smile; then she looked at Snow, her smile fading instantly “Last night.”  
  
“Oh,” Snow exclaimed.  
  
‘Is that a hint of guilt, I see?’ thought Regina.  
  
“What did you find?” asked Belle instead.  
  
“I need to use the Apprentice’s wand.”  
  
“How does that work?” asked Charming.  
  
“Well, I am going to need to have something that belongs to Emma, and the wand will lead me to her, even if she is in another world. Especially if she is in another world.”  
  
The Charmings both nodded at Regina, then turned to look at Belle. She was still standing next to the table.  
  
“Is it true?” Snow asked, in a very unnerving way.  
  
“I…” she started, then slowly moved her attention to Regina. “Yes. Yes, that’s exactly how it works.”  
  
She had no idea how the bookworm had done it, but she had actually understood not to say anything. They might actually start that ‘people in love with ex Dark Ones’ club. She made a mental note to thank her as soon as they were away from prying eyes. The actual way to activate the Apprentice’s wand was by locating the missing person through someone who loved them deeply. She knew she could have had said the truth, and let Henry use it; but she didn’t want him to dabble with magic. Magic always comes with a price, after all.  
  
“Great,” exclaimed Snow, once she had the final confirmation from Belle “we can order now.”  
  
“Now,” said Regina, placing both hands on the booth in front of her, and getting up “I am going to get something that belongs to your daughter, then we are going to find her.”  
  
Charming jumped at her tone of voice, and got out of the booth to let her through.  
  
“You,” Regina continued, pointing at the two idiots “you are going to bring your son to the nuns, or something.”  
  
“You,” she continued, turning around to face Belle, her expression softening up from the tough one reserved to the two “you are going back to Gold, I assume?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Good,” she replied, “I’m going to come with you for the wand, then I need a favor.”  
  
“What is it?” Belle looked at her as if she actually understood her now.  
“Keep an eye on Henry?” she asked, bringing a hand to her stomach, then turning around toward her son.  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“He can stay with us,” said Snow, from behind them “we are his grandparents too, we don’t want to leave Belle with too many responsibilities.”  
  
“It’s no big deal,” she said “you can come with me, if you want, Henry.”  
  
Henry looked closely at his mom, then smiled.  
  
“Coming gr- I mean, Belle.” He took a big gulp of the hot cocoa in front of him, and waited for Snow to let him through.  
  
At the sound of the door opening again, Granny walked behind the counter with a mug in her hands.  
  
“Your tea,” she yelled after them, but the door was closing again, with them on the other side. The ex Evil Queen hadn’t probably even touched her own tea, her mind was probably full of Emma Swan at the moment.

 

* * *

  
  
She was clutching to the two books she had in her arms; she had offered to help carry them. Henry had insisted on carrying the other two, leaving Belle walking empty-handed. She waited till they were at a safe distance from the diner, then she cleared her throat.  
  
“Uhm, Belle?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Thank you for… you know…”  
  
Henry looked at his mom with endearment. He couldn’t believe she was supposed to be the threatening Evil Queen, when there she was, unable to put a full sentence together.  
  
“Oh?” said Belle, tilting her head “Oh! Don’t even mention it.”  
  
“How did you know?” she asked, without thinking, the urge to have an answer greater than her fear of her feelings being exposed.  
  
“It’s not like you have been hiding it,” she smiled “the both of you. Plus, I’m prone to notice things.”  
  
“The both of us?” Regina questioned, stopping on the spot on the sidewalk “I think you are mistaken.”  
  
“I’m pretty sure the feelings are mutual,” said Belle, firmly. It had taken her a while to figure out her own feelings for Rumple back then, and even more to realize he felt the same. But she always knew how to recognize those things in other people: it was like witnessing one of her books in person.  
  
“She has the smelly pirate,” she said, as they started walking again.  
  
“She really can’t see it, can’t she?” she now asked, looking at Henry.  
  
“Nope.”  
  
“I’m right here,” Regina protested.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Belle replied, she was always so prone to apologize, it was unbelievable “I really do think it’s not as unrequited as you think.”  
  
“We’ll see,” she said with a sigh, then tilted her head toward Gold’s shop “shall we?”

 

* * *

  
  
  
Roughly an hour later, Regina was walking again inside the diner. She immediately noticed that they were all where she had left them: Hook at the counter, a few empty glasses and his usual flask in front of him; Snow and Charming were sitting at the same table. The only thing that confirmed that they hadn’t been sitting there was the absence of the baby.  
  
“I see you have finally started listening to me,” she said, approaching the table, causing the couple to look up, they were all snuggled up on one side of the booth “where did you leave your second born?”  
  
“With Blue,” replied Snow, getting up. Charming immediately followed suit.  
  
“Better than the previous option.”  
  
“Did you get everything we need?” asked Charming.  
  
“I did,” replied Regina, taking a greenish wand and Emma’s baby blanket out of her handbag.  
  
“Emma’s baby blanket,” exclaimed Snow surprised.  
  
“I, uh, couldn’t very well carry her yellow bug,” she tried to sound slightly annoyed with this remark, but she really couldn’t hide the smile forming on her face.  
  
Snow smiled and nodded at her; oh, how much she wished she hadn’t figured out everything. Snow had always looked at their interactions as she knew what was going on in Regina’s mind, but it was still Snow. You never know what she is actually thinking about.  
  
“Mom,” Henry ran inside the diner, followed by Belle carrying something unusual in her hand: a glowing rose under a glass dome. It was so unusual to see life copy art, instead of the other way around.  
  
“Henry,” she exclaimed, as he got next to them and stood tall at her side.  
  
Regina looked around the diner: Henry was by her side; Snow and Charming were standing next to them; Belle was placing the rose on the counter a few stools away from a tipsy and unusual silent Hook; Granny had gone to the kitchen saying she’d feel better traveling that way, she wasn’t going to let them fly her diner around without herself in it as well.  
  
“Seems like we are all set,” she said, looking at Snow again now “Ready?”  
  
Everyone in her field of view nodded; so she started making circularly motions just above the blanket, causing it to start glowing. A moment later they felt the whole building starting to detach from the ground.  
  
“What the hell is going on?” came a voice from the back of the diner. They all looked toward it, and saw Hood coming out of the shadows, clearly still trying to button his pants.  
  
“Robin?” said Regina, after what had happened only hours before, she didn’t expect to see him there. “What are you doing here?”  
  
“I… uhm… well,” he looked down, finally able to button himself.  
  
“Right,” she realize all of a sudden “you still live in the woods.”  
  
He nodded, confirming that yes, he was using the bathroom. She wondered how he still looked so constipated.  
  
“What’s going on here?” he asked, holding on to the nearest wall, the diner starting to swirl.  
  
“We are going to Emma,” said Snow, looking out from one of the booths. Henry and the two idiots had started to walk toward it just as she was talking to Hood. She was, stubborn as usual, still standing up.  
  
“The whole diner?” he asked, his face turning pale.  
  
“Where is your son, anyway?” Regina asked, raising an eyebrow.  
  
“I… uhm… I think he is with my Merry Men.”  
  
“Does anyone care about their own children?” Regina asked in an exasperated tone of voice, looking around the room. Henry was smiling at her, proud. The two idiots looked like they wanted to hide. Hood looked at her blankly, he always waited for her to come up with a solution.  
  
“Fine,” she said, finally sitting next to her son “I’m going to magic a message to whoever of your Merry Men has Roland, telling them you are coming with us.”  
  
“I am?”  
  
“I am surely not going to waste the only opportunity to get to Emma, to get you back in the middle of the woods,” she told him, her face turning pinkish at having exposed herself so much “I mean, I can’t let Henry be worried about his other mother for that long.”  
  
Henry placed a hand on her arm and squeezed lightly. She smiled grateful at him. She then watched as Hood walked toward the counter now, holding on to whatever was in his path, and sat down next to Hook. He placed a hand on the other man’s shoulder, causing him to wake up from his sudden nap. Belle had very cleverly decided to sit at one of the other booths as well, apparently, because she was nowhere to be seen. She took a deep breath: all she could do now was wait, and hope that wherever Emma was, she was okay.


	2. Chapter 2

As the darkness was swirling around her, starting to seep into her very soul, she thought she’d see death and destruction. Well, she didn’t know exactly what to expect in a situation like the one she was currently in; but surely, if you are being taken over by a big blob of evil, it must be a rule you won’t be reminded of rainbows and butterflies.  
The reality was completely different: a kind of montage of memories had been triggered in her mind. From Henry knocking at her door, to meeting Regina for the very first time, followed by the trio’s family hugs, and all the times they had been reunited over the years.  
  
The darkness was completely gone then, at least the one on the outside, and she found herself on the cold hard floor somewhere she couldn’t recognize. Before she could question anything, she was elevated, and brought out into the sun, coming out of more dark matter. She was now wearing a hood over her head, her hair feeling wet and sticky against her face.  
  
She looked around trying to guess where she was, the woods didn’t ring a bell; although her mind was still back to those images. They had all been about Henry and Regina.  
  
“Love, dearie,” came a voice out of nowhere, making her startle on the spot.  
  
She removed the hood and looked around.  
  
“What are you doing here?”  
  
“I am not here,” said Rumple, his arms folded, his back against a tree “I’m in your head, you see.”  
  
And at the last words, he was inches away from her. Which didn’t prove his point to her, since he did have magic.  
  
“I know what you are thinking,” he continued, gesturing animatedly “that was magic. Not my own though, yours!”  
  
“I don’t understand.”  
  
“I’m here at your service,” he bowed, making it clear it was not the real Rumple “whatever you need, just ask.”  
  
“Fine, then,” she said, still frantically looking around. She didn’t dare ask, though.  
  
“You don’t have to use your words, I hear it all,” he continued from his previous place against the tree; repeating himself “love, dearie.”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“Simple, really,” he replied with a giggle “if you turn yourself into the Dark One for love, you see who you truly care for. Dare I say love, even?”  
  
She knew then that it was her own subconscious talking in the form of the ex Dark One.  
The moment she had seen the darkness trying to take an hold on Regina, it had all come down on her. She had always felt a certain pull toward the other woman, one she didn’t know how to explain, or dared to try explaining. The only thought of Regina being hurt in any way, had it made all crystal clear in her head. She wanted to save her, protect her... she loved her. It really had been a sudden revelation for her, like having the rug being pulled from under your feet, and finding yourself on the ground. Which ironically was what had happened to her after having absorbed all the darkness.  
  
“Feeling slow, dearie?”  
  
“Shut up,” she snapped, sprinting toward the tree.  
  
“Uh-uh,” came his voice from behind her “the only way to make me shut up is to shut up yourself.”  
  
“Even inside your head,” he added moments later.  
  
“Damn it,” Emma cried out loudly, making a lighting bolt fall from the sky not too far away from where she was standing. She had always triggered lightbulbs in the real world. Maybe she wasn’t in the real world; or maybe she was just lost in the woods somewhere.  
  
“I’d stay away from trees, if I were you.”  
  
The Rumple in her head was slowly starting to sound as annoying as the real one, maybe even more so.  
  
“If you insist on being here,” she growled “at least do something useful.”  
  
“Like what?”  
  
“Find my family.”  
  
“Oh, but you see,” he said, pointing a long scaly finger in her direction “you don’t want to be near your family right now. You are afraid you’ll hurt them.”  
  
Realizing she had no way to prevent this, having her thoughts spoken up by a person she could actually see, she sank into her knees, bringing he hands to her head. A gulp escaped her mouth, but a moment later she was sprinting to her feet again. Her mind working quicker this time, bringing her hand to his throat and pushing him hard against the same tree.  
  
“Tell me,” she ordered, as he rolled his eyes and brought his hand to his mouth to fake a yawn.  
  
“I know what you know,” he said, replying to the new silent question “and I can access Rumple’s memories up to the point he was still the Dark One.”  
  
“How does that help me?” She asked, tightening her hold on his throat, just out of frustration, fully knowing she wasn’t doing any real damage to any real person. Perhaps to her own mind, who could tell?  
  
“I know things you don’t know,” he said in a singsong voice. The exact opposite of what he had just told her.  
  
It was all absurd to her, the whole situation was. She let go of him nonetheless, taking a few steps back.  
  
“Talk,” she ordered.  
  
“It’s not the right time,” he told her with another of his usual laughs “you are not ready.”  
  
And then she was cursing herself for having let go of him so soon, even if it was just a figment of her own imagination. She should have had a tighter hold on his neck, force everything out of him.  
  
“I am going to be ready when you are. No need to use your brute force on me. Save it for someone else.”  
  
Before she could question him further, noises of something or someone moving in the woods, made her stand still. She tried to hear where exactly it was coming from, and then she snapped her attention toward that spot. She squinted her eyes, with her posture ready to defend herself if whatever came into view wanted to attack her.  
  
“Emma?” it was Snow’s voice that came first, then she appeared from behind some trees, bow on her shoulder ready to be used if necessary.  
  
“Mom?” as she said that, Charming came into view as well “Dad?”  
  
She looked from one to the other, she could clearly see they were afraid to get too close.  
  
“How did you get here?”  
  
Before either of them could give her an answer, Hook answered for them.  
  
“It doesn't matter how. Has anything ever stopped me before?”  
  
She looked at him in disbelieve, keeping her distance, even as he slowly approached her.  
  
A moment later, Regina and Henry appeared, both with hope written all over their faces. She was about to go to them first, when Hood walked right next to Regina. She furrowed her eyes at that, and then accepted the hug Hook wanted to give her. She would have preferred to hug her son first, but the jealousy had taken over again, so she did what she had always done in the past. Every time she saw Regina with Hood, she clung even more to Hook. Even in that moment, while hugging him, her whole attention was on her. It was always her. Then something at the corner of her eyes caught her attention: the more she tightened her grip on Hook, the more the Rumple in her head smiled proudly.  She let go immediately.  
  
“You okay, love?”  
  
“Yes,” she lied through her teeth “you shouldn’t have come here, I could hurt you.”  
  
That last part she said looking at Regina straight in the eye. Regina lowered her gaze at that.  
  
“We know you won’t,” said Snow, still a few feet away from her daughter.  
  
“You don’t know that,” Emma said with what sounded like a growl.  
  
Snow shook her head, finally getting closer, Charming following her lead.  
  
“Here,” she said, handing her the dagger “we think you should have it.”  
  
“Take it. You’ll be able to control yourself,” added Charming. It sounded as they had rehearsed what they were about to say all the way there, however it was that they reached where she was.  
  
“No,” she protested, raising her voice.  
  
“Emma, think about it. If it falls into the wrong hands, what it could do… what you could do…” Hook added.  
  
She squinted her eyes at those words, he had a point after all.  
  
“The fight to control my darkness has just begun. It’s too much power. Someone needs to watch me.”  
  
She took the dagger with her own name engraved on it from Snow, and turned around to hand it to Regina.  
  
“Are you serious?” she questioned, genuinely surprised.  
  
“I saved you. Now save me. And if you can’t save me, do what no one else will willingly do. You’re the only one who will get past their feelings and do what is necessary… destroy me,” she said in one go, somehow having Robin there had been proof that the other woman didn’t feel the same. She was sure she would be the only one who didn’t have enough strong feelings to stop her from doing the right thing if necessary. Her parents had been proven not to be able to make a good decision when it came to her and her potential for evil. Hook had been completely out of discussion. And Henry… well, he was just a kid.  
  
“It won’t come to that,” her son told her in a firm voice, getting closer and enveloping her in a hug.  
  
“I know, kid,” she reassured him, finally hugging him tightly. She looked at Regina as she said so; only now noticing that since she had handed the dagger to her, Rumple was nowhere to be seen. 

 

* * *

  
  
Ten minutes later they were all making their way inside Granny’s diner. Granny had welcomed them back where they had landed, with the promise of her famous lasagna for all. As they got inside, everyone found a sit at a table. The moment Regina was about to sit at an empty booth, Emma called for her.  
  
She looked up with questioning eyes.  
  
“Can I have a word?” she asked, making everyone else in the room turn around in her direction “in private?”  
  
Regina nodded at her, and was actually glad everyone else got their attention elsewhere as fast as they had focused their attention on them, the only two people left standing in the middle of the room. Granny had started handing out plates from behind the counter, after all.  
  
They made their way to the back of the diner, to the same place they had once stood when Emma and Henry had come back to town, and Henry did not remember about Regina.  
  
“How did you do it?” whispered Emma, her back against the wall.  
  
“Did what?” she whispered back.  
  
“Get here. Get everyone here.”  
  
Regina looked down at her feet; her blood was still boiling for the way Emma had hugged the guy-liner, and the way she had seemed to have bought his lie earlier on.  
  
“Come on,” she protested, causing Regina to look up again “I know you are behind this all. It always comes down to one person to save everyone’s asses, and that’s you, Regina.”  
  
Her own name said like that, in the way only Emma Swan could say it, made her stomach do a flip. She nodded, her face suddenly serious, she told her everything she needed to know. Well, everything she thought she needed to know.  
  
“Thank you,” Emma said at the end of the explanation.  
  
“It’s nothing,” she brushed it off as something as simple as giving someone a ride to the airport.  
  
“I mean it. Thank you, Regina,” she repeated nonetheless.  
  
Regina smiled softly in response, then they stared at each other for what felt like a moment and forever at the same time.  
  
“I have to find Merlin,” Emma said at last.  
  
“Merlin?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“How do you know that?”  
  
“I… I am not sure. I just know,” she wanted to tell her all about the Rumple she had started seeing the moment she had turned into the Dark One; she wanted to tell her somewhere private though. And most importantly, she wanted to find the right words first.  
  
“Okay,” Regina furrowed her brows, understanding that Emma was holding something back “we need to find Merlin, then.”  
  
“Hey, moms,” came Henry’s voice before she could say anything back.  
  
“Hey, kid.”  
  
“What are you doing?” he questioned, looking at them both, then stopping to scrutinize Regina’s expression “Did you tell her?”  
  
“I didn’t, sweetheart,” Regina shook her head slightly, hoping he would get her signal.  
  
“Tell me what?”  
  
“Well,” started Henry, reading uncertainty into his mom’s eyes “mom and I started ‘Operation Swan.’”  
  
“You did?” she asked clearly touched, looking at their son first, and then at his other mother next “you are part of it, too?”  
  
“Our son can be very convincing,” she replied, with a slight nod, putting her facade back on. She didn’t know why she hadn’t just let Henry tell the truth. Maybe because Emma had clung so weirdly to Hook, she had took it as a confirmation that her sacrifice had been done to fulfill her Savior duties, and there was nothing else behind it. She was just glad Henry had understood and had kept going with the cover Operation they had been telling everyone else.  
  
“I know,” Emma replied drily “I’m hungry now.”  
  
And just like that, she was at the counter, asking Granny for a plate.  
  
“Why didn’t you tell her?” Henry asked immediately.  
  
“It’s complicated…”  
  
“It’s not,” he protested, he couldn’t believe how two people that were so clearly in love with each other couldn’t just be together. He didn’t get adults most of the time.  
  
“Henry, please.” Her voice was low, and a bit strained, as she looked at Hook sitting down at the stool next to Emma.  
  
‘That’s my seat,’ she thought, before she walked in the other direction, and toward the restroom.  
  
Henry shook his head at the scene.  
  
  
“Love,” said Hook.  
  
Emma looked in his direction and simply shrugged. She couldn’t really be bothered at the moment, especially when she was finally having something to eat.  
  
“Lad,” he said as Henry was sitting down at the other stool next to his mom.  
  
Henry shrugged at him as well. He only smiled as Granny brought him a plate.  
  
“Mate,” he said a couple of minutes later to Charming, who was approaching the counter to grab two full plates for Snow and himself. He smiled at him, he finally got some kind of recognition.  
  
“Afraid someone might think you are gay?” Rumple’s voice ringed in her head. She looked up immediately, and noticed he was inches away from Hook’s face.  
  
“I’m not talking about you, dear. You are as gay as anyone can be,” he continued in her direction, before looking at the pirate with a disgusted expression “I’m talking to him. It’s always ‘love’ for the women, ‘mate’ for the men. I don’t make that kind of distinction: it’s ‘dear’ for everyone.”  
  
She almost chuckled at that. She had never realized that deep in her subconscious she thought that about his weird nicknames for everyone. He really was the perfect example of weak masculinity. What actually made her chuckle was the Rumple in her head leaning over and planting a kiss on Hook’s cheek.  
  
“Something wrong, love?”  
  
The question made her start laughing even harder.  
  
“You okay, ma?”  
  
“Yeah, kid,” she replied, slowly turning around to face her son, composing herself “where is your mom?”  
  
“Last time I saw her, she was going to the bathroom,” he replied, placing the fork he was holding on the almost empty plate “do you want me to look for her?”  
  
“Don’t worry,” she reassured him “I’m going to do it. You finish your lasagna.”  
  
She walked into the restroom area, only to find it completely empty. All the stalls were empty as well. She wondered how she hadn’t noticed Regina walking out of the diner. It was the only place she could have gone to, she wasn’t at any of the boots either. She made her way back into the dining area, and walked out the door.  
  
“Regina?” She called out. The sky was getting darker by the minute. She spotted her on a huge rock not too far away, her back to her. For a moment she had sworn she had seen it move as she had been sobbing. She called her name again.  
  
“What?” Regina said more harshly than intended, finally tuning around “Are you done clinging to the walking syphilis?”  
  
“Where is your faithful Robin Hood?” She shot back. That last remark making Rumple appear again. He was standing there, grinning to himself.  
  
“Look, Emma...” Regina started, after taking a deep breath.  
  
“Don’t listen to her,” said Rumple, too close to the other woman for her liking “she just doesn’t like sharing the darkness.”  
  
“Shut up,” she exclaimed, unable to contain herself.  
  
Regina widened her eyes at that, she knew being the Dark One wasn’t easy, but that was too much. She got up with the intention to go inside the diner again. Her instinct would have been to poof far far away, and not just as far as from the bathroom to barely outside the door. But she couldn’t do that because she had no intention of leaving Henry behind.  
  
“No, wait, Regina,” Emma implored now “I wasn’t talking to you, I was...”  
  
Before she could finish her sentence, they both heard the sound of horses getting nearer. Without saying a single word, they stood side by side in their usual fighting position.  
  
“We are not here to fight,” said one of the men approaching on horseback.  
  
“Who are you?” asked Regina, a fireball ready in her hand “and what do you want?”  
  
“I am King Arthur of Camelot,” he replied, his head high “and I am looking for the Savior.”


	3. Chapter 3

Regina brought a hand to her head, she felt slightly dizzy, and didn’t understand what she was doing on the diner’s floor. She immediately brought her other hand to Henry’s shoulder, he was close to her on the floor, and shook him lightly.  
  
He murmured something under his breath, without opening his eyes.  
  
“Henry? sweetheart?” she said “you need to wake up!”  
As her son finally opened his eyes, she got up, and offered him her hand.  
  
“What happened?” he asked, accepting it and getting up as well.  
  
“I don’t know,” she admitted. She brought her hand to the same spot on her head, and looked around the room. Snow and Charming were laying next to each other on the floor a few feet away; Snow was just then starting to open her eyes. Belle was at one of the booths, her head propped on the table, her arms clinging hard to the glass dome. Granny was sitting next to her, with her head brought back. She was very much breathing as she was clearly snoring loudly. There was no sign of anyone else.  
  
“You are finally back,” came the loud voice of one of the dwarfs getting inside the diner. They had just witness the entire building drop from the sky and into its usual position.  
  
“Leroy?” said Snow, as her and Charming were getting up “what do you mean finally? We haven’t been gone a day.”  
  
“A day?” He snorted, the other dwarfs nodding and grinning in the background “you have been gone two weeks, sister.”  
  
“How is that possible?” asked Charming.  
  
“Don’t ask me,” Leroy shrugged.  
  
“That’s right,” came Emma’s voice from the still open door. Well, Emma’s unusual lower voice “don’t ask him. Move.”  
  
That last part, such a rude order made toward the dwarfs of all people, followed by Happy being knocked against the counter, caused Regina to get goosebumps. She had seen Emma mad, but she never sounded, or acted this... heartless before.  
  
“Emma?” she almost whispered, as she saw the other woman finally get in. She had her hair pushed back, and in a ponytail, it looked like her hair had suddenly aged fifty years. She was wearing a full on body leather suit clinging very tightly to her body “what happened to you?”  
  
“Oh,” this brand new version of Emma said, getting with her face inches away from hers “you don’t remember?”  
  
“You know damn well we don’t remember,” replied Regina, voice full of rage. She momentarily looked at the other woman’s lips, part of her attracted by this new darker side; then she brought both hands to her waist, only then realizing she was wearing something velvety.  
  
“Looking for this?” Emma asked, bringing the dagger to her throat.  
  
“Emma, don’t,” Snow cried out.  
  
Emma’s eyes snapped to where her parents were standing. “Don’t worry,” she said “I’m not going to hurt her.”  
  
“Mom, please,” said Henry, as his mom didn’t really show any sign of wanting to move the weapon from his other mother’s throat “we don’t want to hurt you.”  
  
Emma’s eyes immediately snapped in his direction, but softened up considerably. She lowered the dagger, and got close to her son, bringing her free hand to his cheek.  
  
“I know you don’t want to hurt me, kid,” she said, putting emphasis on the ‘kid.’  
  
Regina looked at the whole interaction very closely: both noticing how their son didn’t seem to be scared, and how different Emma sounded.  
  
“None of us want to hurt you,” he continued, causing her to look at him with sad eyes.  
  
“I’m not done with you,” she said instead, looking at Regina in the eye this time. She raised her free hand in front of her face a moment after, disappearing in white smoke.  
  
“What the hell just happened?” exclaimed Leroy, as he and everyone else in the room had their eyes glued on Regina; obviously looking for an answer she clearly didn’t have.  
  
“I don’t know,” she said, looking down. She didn’t know what exactly had happened, but she surely felt like she had already failed her promise made to Emma to save her.

 

* * *

 

  
  
Regina was surprised at how quickly the two idiots had jumped into action this time. Maybe it was the sudden realization that Emma might have been an actual threat to them all; or maybe the guilt of learning they hadn’t been able to help her. She didn’t really care what their motivations were at the moment, she just appreciated not having to do all on her own.  
  
They had landed in Storybrooke in the middle of the night, making it easier for all to agree to start a plan as soon as the sun was up. She was also relieved at the fact that Snow and Charming actually wanted to go check on baby Neal. Regina reminded them to warn Blue and the rest of the nuns of their current situation; having both fairies and dwarfs up to speed, she was sure the word would have travelled faster around the town. Belle had ran immediately to Gold’s shop, rose still glowing in the glass dome, hoping it actually reflected the state of being of her beloved. Her and Henry had poofed in the middle of her vault: she both needed to be sure all her potions and spells were securely protected by her blood magic, and wanted to see if she could find a way to bring her memories back. She was hoping to bring her own back first, giving her the time to see just how much of a threat Emma really was. As selfish as it might had been, she didn’t want everyone to gang up against Emma at once.  
She had spent the next couple of hours or so looking through books once again; Henry at first had followed her every move closely, then he had ultimately fallen asleep on the bed she had made appear just for him.  
  
Now, she was walking in the middle of Main Street on her own, following on the plan they had all agreed on that morning: find Emma and try to reason with her.  
  
Her first destination was going to be the station. The moment she saw the yellow bug parked out front, her heart involuntarily skipped a bit. She knew it had probably been parked there since before this whole situation had started in the first place, but she still hoped to find Emma inside.  
  
She walked into the station, her voice calling for the other woman resonating into the empty space. She got to Emma’s office, her eyes softening up at the sight of Emma’s signature red leather jacket propped on the back of the chair. She looked around the empty room one last time, then grabbed the item of clothing, and sat down behind the desk.  
  
“When did you become so sentimental?” came Emma’s voice, as she was closing her eyes and burying her face into the leather.  
  
“Emma?” she said, looking up, too shocked to even think of a good comeback.  
  
“Aren’t you with the heroic thief?” she continued, ‘heroic’ said with a dark chuckle “where is he anyway?”  
  
“I...” Regina started, looking around. She had no idea where Hood was; she hadn’t even fully noticed his absence till that moment. Then she remembered about another detail she had overlooked “where is Hook?”  
  
There was a flick of something in Emma’s otherwise express-less eyes that told her she didn’t know either. Emma jumped off the desk immediately, giving her her back.  
  
“Try not to wet my jacket too much,” she said, before poofing away, leaving only white smoke behind her.  
  
Regina brought her hand to her face, she hadn’t even realized she had started crying, and looked once again at a spot where Emma had disappeared from.  
  
Her phone started ringing just in time to snap her out of her thoughts, before she could let herself go down the rabbit hole. She took it from her pocket, looked at the ‘David’ blinking on its monitor, and pressed the green button.  
  
“Yes?” She said, then listened to the inevitable question from the other side “no, she isn’t here. Not anymore.”

* * *

 

  
  
“Problems of the heart, dearie?” asked Rumple as soon as she appeared in the dark room. She couldn’t see him, but she was positive he was grinning. What she had come to understand over the weeks was that he wasn’t there as some kind of guide. No, he wasn’t there to help her at all, not at that stage; he was there as a representation of her own darkness. At least for the most part, that was.  
  
“Shut up,” she cried out, fully aware that it was probably not going to last long. Right after, she sat down at one of the chairs near the kitchen table, letting out a long sigh. She made the dagger materialize in front of her on the table, fingers lightly stroking her own name engraved on it. She took a deep breath, taking in the new smell of the house. She had chosen it because she knew nobody had lived in it in a while, and had actually been on sale since before she had set foot in town for the very first time. She needed to be able to be somewhere she knew no one would go looking for her. Even if it pissed her off how happy being away from her family - especially Henry and Regina - made the Rumple in her head. Even if her own darkness was enjoying how much she was keeping her own family at arm’s length, she couldn’t do anything to change it. Not with what she was aware of.  
  
“Love is weakness, didn’t I tell you?” remarked Rumple, now sitting at the other end of the table. She knew he was there even without being able to see him, she always knew. The silence had lasted a full two minutes.  
  
“So you keep telling me,” she replied, bringing a hand to her hair, still not used to the ever-wet feeling she got touching it.  
  
“Couldn’t you have chosen another color?” he asked as he had done half a dozen times before.  
  
“It’s not like I had a choice, did I?”  
  
“As I recall I was there when you opted for that horrid silver dye.”  
  
“You know very well what I mean,” she said loudly, the echo in the empty house repeating everything she said back at her; as if she needed more of that. She stood up quickly, and placed her hands on the table, the dagger disappearing in thin air.  
  
She looked at Rumple still sitting at the table as she flicked the light on with her magic, she needed to see his reactions. He was now cutting himself a pomegranate, and was grinning up at her more than she imagined he had done in the dark before. She knew she was inevitably giving him exactly what he wanted. She also knew she was only borrowing time: time she didn’t actually have. All the voices in her head told her so, not that the actual manifestation of Rumple didn’t do it enough already. She was aware of the plan set in place, and she was more than aware of its steep price. She laughed out loud at the irony, walking into the living room, waiting for her now faithful companion to follow her.  
  
“I am not your faithful anything,” he said promptly, already waiting for her, sitting in front of the empty fireplace somehow contradicting his own statement.  
  
“Or your sidekick,” he continued, uncrossing and crossing his legs “you can be a princess on your own time. Leave me out of it.”  
  
“I am not a princess,” she tried to say as calmly as possible. The rage was what kept feeding him the most.  
  
“If the shoe fits… or dare I say, the family name?” He kept on taunting her, his chin propped on his hand now.  
  
“I am far from a Charming,” she replied through gritted teeth, as she sat at the single couch in the middle of the room, and closed her eyes.  
  
“I can already picture it: a pink dress, bright smile, a dull prince at your side.”  
  
“I. am. not. a. princess,” she repeated, almost spelling out every single word.  
  
At the sudden silence, she opened her eyes and looked in his direction: the fireplace  was suddenly alight. By the look on his face and his gleeful clapping, her rage had caused it. She hated him now more than ever. She stared at him, wishing so much he was an actual physical manifestation she could set fire to.  
  
“Be careful what you wish for, dearie,” he said, now sitting at her side.  
  
“Would you stop moving?”  
  
“Would you stop thinking, and thinking, and thinking?” He started mimicking someone talking with his hand, right in her face “It’s not easy being in your head.”  
  
“Well, just tell them,” she shot up as she said it.  
  
“You know that’s not how it works.”  
  
He was already standing at the door, his back against the stand, arms crossed.  
She followed his voice, and wished so hard she could just grab her dagger and stab him to take that stupid grin off his face once and for all.  
  
“I told you… be careful what you wish for.”  
  
She damned herself, and damned the fact that Dark Ones didn’t need to sleep. She longed for a nice long dreamless sleep where no one was there to disturb her.  
  
She then suddenly remembered of the vial she had found on herself the moment she had appeared back in Storybrooke. It was a small blue glass bottle containing a sleeping potion. She took it and drank a generous amount of it, before lying down on the couch. Closing her eyes again, she wondered if it would work on Dark Ones. She also wondered why being one was so painful even if you had taken the darkness in out of love; and how much worse it would have been if she had done it out of hate. She finally fell asleep with that question filling her mind.

* * *

  
  
“Emma? Emma?” came the voice somewhere in her dreamless sleep. She shot upright on the couch, her eyes wide open. Nobody was supposed to know where she was.  
  
“I know you are in there,” came Regina’s voice. Of course if anyone was able to find her so quickly, it would have to be her.  
She walked slowly to the front door, almost dragging her feet, noticing the light still on in the kitchen. That was probably what had given away the fact that the house wasn’t as empty as it was supposed to be.  
  
“Miss Swan,” said Regina now, rage sipping through every word.  
  
She flung the door open with her magic and looked at the shorter woman glare at her. She also noticed a hint of satisfaction in her eyes.  
  
“What?” she asked, now getting close enough “the Queen can’t wait for someone to answer the door?”  
  
“I have been ringing the damn bell for 10 minutes,” Regina replied, fists closed at her sides, looking her up and down.  
  
“What if I wasn’t there?” challenged Emma, her voice lower still.  
  
“I saw you through the window, you were…”  
  
Emma cursed herself for not having thought of drapes, and for not having moved the stupid couch from the stupid window. She also immediately realized Regina could have had just decided to barge in, but she didn’t. She appreciated her for that.  
  
“I… what?” she asked with a hard voice nonetheless, she couldn’t have the luxury of getting too soft, not around her.  
  
“You weren’t moving…” she said, fists closing harder. They both knew it wasn’t that easy to kill a Dark One; but they also both knew Dark Ones didn’t sleep.  
  
“Sleeping potion,” she let out, before realizing she had let the other woman get to her. Even her voice was softer.  
  
“Where did you get it?” Regina asked, tilting her head “it must have been something really powerful to work on you.”  
  
“Did you come here for a reason, or…” Emma asked, leaning against the door frame, her harsh voice back.  
  
“Where the hell is Robin?”  
  
“It’s always about the thief with you, isn’t it?”  
  
“Stop playing games, what did you do to him?”  
  
“Why do you assume I have done something to him?”  
  
Regina tilted her head again and raised her eyebrow in response.  
  
“Oh, right. Because right now I am the biggest threat to this town.”  
  
“Emma,” Regina said softly now “I’m just worried about Roland, that’s all.”  
  
“Have you thought about asking those Merry Men of his?”  
  
“No, but I might.”  
  
They stared at each other for a short moment, then Emma looked away.  
  
“I should…” started Regina.  
  
“Yes, you should,” she nodded, while removing her shoulder from the door frame, standing still in the middle of it. She looked as the other woman nodded back and made her way down the steps and toward the gate.  
  
“I have no reason to want to get rid of Hood, anyway,” she added, before she was out of earshot.  
  
She watched as Regina didn’t even turn around at that, but she simply kept walking. The moment she was out of her sight, Emma got inside the house, closing the door harshly behind her, before she leaned with her back against it. Silent tears started running down her face. It hurt too much: having to be this hard on Regina, and having to see her so focused on someone else. What she didn’t know was that the only reason why Regina hadn’t turned around at her remark was because she didn’t want to be seen crying.  
Moments later, she remembered where the potion came from: she was about to take it in Camelot to be able to tune them out; tune them all out. Something had clearly prevented her from drinking it.

* * *

 

  
“You summoned me?” asked Regina entering her vault three days later “isn’t that something reserved only to Dark Ones?”  
  
She tried saying that last part in a playful tone to lighten up the inevitable heavy conversation that was about to come. The last three days doing nothing but try to find a solution to the collective lack of memory of their time in Camelot had made her voice come out dry and serious. She hadn’t even managed to let out a chuckle or laugh of some sort at the end of it.  
  
“Regina…” Emma replied in her new low voice, making everything sound even more serious, and the conversation hadn’t even started yet. She slowly turned around to face the other woman “I didn’t summ…”  
  
Regina did manage to raise an eyebrow at that, causing her to stop mid-sentence.  
  
“Oh, you were being funny,” Emma said, her face expressionless, but oh so pale. It looked paler than she had looked so far. She almost looked like she had bags under her eyes, as if she was still lacking the sleep she couldn’t get as a Dark One.  
  
Regina nodded and narrowed her eyes, trying to understand what was really going on. Since the last time they had seen each other, she had expected to have to deal with Emma trying to disrupt the town’s peace, or at least try to stop her from doing her research. Despite her constant vigilant state, none of those things had happened.  
  
“You wanted to see me?” she tried asking again, letting go the need to lightened up the mood altogether.  
  
“Did you do as I asked you?” Emma replied with a question of her own, her jaw clenching hard at the end of it.  
  
“Yes. Henry, your parents, and your baby brother are all at the mansion. I used blood magic to keep them safe from the outside world.”  
  
The unexpected text received from Emma a couple of hours earlier had caused her to have a short anxiety attack, only being stopped by the need to keep her son safe. She didn’t know why his other mother had made such a request out of the blue, but she was sure that not even being the Dark One would have made her want to put their son in danger. It had taken her less time casting the protection spell around the mansion than it had been convincing the three of them to get into it in the first place. The two idiots, as annoying as they were at times, had never backed down from a fight; whether they had been in the right or in the wrong, they had always been the first ones in the battlefield. Of course, as self-proclaimed rightful heroes, they thought they were the ones always in the right. It had been hard to convince them she knew what she was doing, and that they needed to listen to her.  
Henry, instead, wanted to prove himself worthy of being part of a family of heroes; he wanted to be one as well. When that hadn’t had any effect on Regina, he had tried to use ‘Operation Unicorn’ to his advantage, telling her he was part of it too. Regina had enveloped him in a long and tight hug, only to poof right after and leave him in the middle of the foyer. The protection spell had already been put in place.  
  
Emma’s fists at her sides clenched even more at that, but she nodded slowly at the info.  
  
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Regina asked in a desperate voice.  
  
“I almost told you once, and it almost put you… all of you, in grave danger.”  
  
“When did you…” she left the question hanging, she already knew the answer to it “it was in Camelot, wasn’t it? Why can’t I remember? Why can you?”  
  
“The less you know, the better,” Emma replied, her voice cold. It hurt being that harsh on her.  
  
“Why did you call me here, then?” she asked once more, bringing her hand to her stomach.  
  
“I need you to do something for me.”  
  
Regina tilted her head in question, still trying to read Emma, trying to read pass the expressionless face.  
  
“Remember what I told you in Camelot when I gave you the dagger?”  
  
“You asked me to save you as you saved me,” her gaze fell down at the guilt she felt for not having being able to keep her promise.  
  
“No, what I asked you to do after,” said Emma, the dagger appearing in her left hand still at her side.  
  
Regina raised an eyebrow, of course she remembered what the other had asked her to do in case she wasn’t able to save her. Of course she knew. She shook her head no, hard. She wasn’t going to do it.  
  
“Regina…” she said in a pleading voice.  
  
“No,” she replied firmly, finally looking up again “I’m not going to destroy you. You can’t ask me to do that.”  
  
“Then you leave me no other choice,” said Emma, before raising her right hand and blowing some kind of dust in Regina’s face.  
  
Regina tried to protest or do something, but she found herself unable to move or speak. She looked as the other woman disappeared into white smoke. It felt as if that had been the only thing she had done lately; that, and have her nose stuck in a book.  
  
Her eyes were starting to give in to all the tiredness caused by all the restless and sleepless nights. She was still frozen on the spot, almost asleep, but still damning her own self in her mind. Why did she give in so easily to Emma’s request? Not the one about keeping their son safe, of course. The one requiring her to lift the blood magic spell surrounding the vault and all its content. Because that was certainly one of her own potions that had put her in this position. She surely hoped there was a good reason behind Emma’s behavior; she doubted it was a bad one, but she felt like she wasn’t going to like the result of it anyway. Her mind started giving in to sleep: unable to fight it back any longer, she closed her eyes.


	4. Chapter 4

What felt like ages later, she jerked herself awake, and automatically fell on the floor. The spell had clearly been lifted from her body, causing her to lose control of her muscles for a moment. She massaged her calf, still confused at what she was doing in that position; she had been finding herself on the floor a lot lately. Then she remembered, her eyebrows shooting up, and she got up as well. She held a hand up in order to have something belonging to Emma materialize in it, this time it was her red leather jacket, and she poured a location spell on it. She didn’t have time to guess where the other might have been, or play detective all around the town. She didn’t know how long it had been since she had left her in the vault. She didn’t know how much had happened since she had let sleep take over her mind.  
The leather jacket started glowing and levitating in front of her, before it sprinted toward the vault’s steps. She slightly pushed her hair back and out of her face, and followed the enchanted object.  
  
And she ran after the item of clothing that had grown on her so much over the years. She ran as fast as her tired body allowed her to. Her heart seemed like it was doing an extra shift, the beating organ guiding her toward the woman she loved almost as much as the magic was. It felt the same way it did the night Emma had turned into the dark one. Except this time, her whole body felt like shaking; like the feeling in the pit of her stomach about Emma being in a different realm that famous night had now been replaced by complete terror.  
  
She drew a sharp breath the moment she noticed the jacket slowing down and coming to a halt, gently falling in her unconsciously outstretched hands. Instead of focusing on her surroundings, she closed her eyes shut, and took another deep breath. She opened them a moment later: she didn’t even have the time to register that they were at the docs, that her attention was caught by what Emma was doing.  
Her heart skipped a beat at the scene: she had just witnessed Emma stabbing herself in the stomach. And now she was falling down, the weapon used disappearing into thin air. Emma’s seemingly lifeless body falling backward on the ground; her clothing magically changed from the black leather suit to Emma’s regular clothes, including the red leather jacket. Regina looked down at her hands in shock, then she ran one last time for that dreadful night. She ran toward the woman she loved, and kneeled down next to her.  
  
“Idiot,” she whispered to herself, bringing a hand to her pale throat to check the pulse.  
  
“You idiot,” she said out loud this time. She had died on her, how could she do that to her? To Henry? What was she thinking?  
  
She brought her hand up to an equally pale cheek, slowly brushing her fingertips over it. Her other hand hovering over the stab wound, making it and all the blood disappear from her sight. Emma’s face was still as cold and as still as before.  
Her own body was trembling now, and her mind was racing. Wondering if she could undo this somehow, bring back the clock maybe? Wonder if there was an even simpler solution she wasn’t thinking of... or didn’t want to think of because a negative outcome from that would be too devastating. Tears started falling from her eyes. The very first one hitting Emma right where her heart was: the moment it did, a small yellow light illuminated the motionless heart. Emma entire body was somehow responding to her own, giving her the final push she needed. She leaned over, lips shyly brushing against Emma’s. The contact had been minimal, but effective: a rainbow colored light emanated from between them, causing her to jump back a little and look down, hopeful.  
  
“And you call that a kiss?” asked Emma in her usual voice, bringing two fingers to her lips, right before she opened her eyes.  
  
“Seriously? You are complaining about how I saved your life?” replied Regina, unable to contain a big toothy smile.  
  
“Are you stealing my lines now?” she remarked back, matching the other woman’s smile, while pushing herself up.  
  
“Oh, shut up.”  
  
“Make me,” said Emma, now sitting on the ground next to a still kneeling Regina.  
  
Regina tilted her head at that remark, lightly biting her inner cheek. Her heart was beating faster now, but for completely different reasons: she was excited. Excited at the idea that Emma was alive. Excited that the mere touch of their lips had triggered a True Love kiss. Excited at the fact that Emma was cheekily telling her to kiss her again. And that she did: she leaned forward, grabbed Emma’s face between her hands, and kissed her with need. The need immediately matched by how Emma was kissing her back: hands in her hair, a small moan involuntarily escaping her lips.  
  
One thought ran into her head like a shock of electricity: she had saved Emma just as Emma had saved her in the past; just as she had asked her to do. She then pulled away from the kiss, their faces still close enough, the tips of their noses still touching.  
  
“How did you know it was me?” Regina asked, looking up “just there, how did you know it was me that had kissed you?”  
  
“Besides the fact that you called me an idiot?” Emma asked with a chuckle, pushing herself backward, both hands behind her on the asphalt, needing to take a better look at the woman in front of her.  
  
“Wait,” she said, bringing a hand to her head “this almost happened before, didn’t it?”  
  
Emma simply nodded. It had indeed almost happened before...

  
  
**********************************************************

  
“Emma, please,” she begged, following the other woman into Camelot’s forest “can you please for once just stop being so stubborn and tell me what’s going on?”  
  
Emma stopped in her tracks without a warning, turning around, an angry expression on her face.  
  
“You don’t know what’s at stake.”  
  
“If you tell me, maybe I can help you.”  
  
“You can’t.” Her voice was a bit shaky while saying that, but she didn’t give in. She turned around and started marching forward, going even faster than she had done before.  
  
Regina followed her close behind, she was going to do everything in her power to help her escape the darkness.  
  
“The bookworm told me,” she said at last, after walking in silence for a full five minutes.  
  
Emma stopped next to a well, and turned around, an eyebrow raised in question.  
  
“I mean, Belle. Belle told me,” she said getting closer “she told me how you were able to free Merlin from the tree.”  
  
“She shouldn’t have done that,” she placed a hand on the well, feeling the coolness of its stone against her skin. She looked inside it, recalling another well in another world. It felt like ages ago now that August had brought her to it and had offered her a drink from it. She recalled how much in the dark she was back then: she had no idea how much of what Henry was telling her was actually real. She wondered if she had been better off not knowing all of it. Of course she didn’t regret saving her son, not even for a second. What she wondered about was if they had done things differently from the start... she shook her head to get herself out of her thoughts. That was them using her own memories against her, she couldn’t allow it, she was stronger than that.  
“I told all of you to stay out of it.”  
  
“You were gone for a week, Emma,” Regina’s eyes started to get wet at the memory “you were gone a week after freeing Merlin, we got worried. She found the spell you used, and... and...”  
  
“What?” Lowering her eyes, she focused her attention on her own hand.  
  
“And you lied to me... to us...” Regina continued, getting a bit closer, placing her own hand inches away from Emma’s.  
  
“It wasn’t me,” she blurted out. Eyes meeting Regina’s, before darting them down again. She shouldn’t have said that.  
  
“Who was then?”  
  
“Regina, please...” she pleaded, now looking up, giving her her best puppy eyes.  
  
“Look,” Regina said, making the dagger appear between their hands “I could use it, but I won’t. Just please, tell me what’s going on.”  
  
“What did Belle tell you?” Emma was getting good at deflecting her questions. Not good enough for Regina not to see through her lies. She had seen it even as Emma was explaining her how to free Merlin; but she had let her be, thinking someone breathing down her neck wouldn’t have helped her anyway. That was before her and Merlin had just disappeared into thin air for a whole week.  
  
“She told me that...” Regina cleared her throat, pushing her hand as far back from the dagger as possible “she told me that in order for the potion to work, whoever is casting it needs a tear of their True Love. In this case, True Loves. You used both Henry’s and mine.”  
  
“You lied to me too. About the Apprentice’s Wand.”  
  
“You knew I was lying, I could see it all over your face that first day at Granny’s. Plus, you are with the pirate...”  
  
“... you are with Hood!”  
  
“I am not.”  
  
“You aren’t?”  
  
“No,” Regina let out a sigh “no, I am not. We broke up the night you turned into the Dark One. I broke up with him.”  
  
“Why is he always clinging to you? I’m surprised he isn’t here right now.” She looked around as if expecting said man to appear somewhere between the trees.  
  
“I don’t know,” Regina said instinctively, before realizing she was trying to lie again “because of stupid pixie dust and that whole damn soul mate thing Tinker Bell told me about all those years ago. He still believes in that.”  
  
“And you don’t?”  
  
“Of course not.” A tear of frustration escaped her eye “You are missing the point here. True love is a two way street.”  
  
Emma looked up, locking her eyes with Regina’s once more, realization of everything coming rushing through her mind. For a small moment her mind was blank, except for her own voice telling her to act then and there. All they needed was a kiss.  
She moved forward, her hand brushing besides the dagger as she did so, before she let it fall at her side.  
Regina mimicked her movement, and a second later their lips were touching, barely brushing against each other, giving a small hint of True Love magic.  
  
“I can’t,” said Emma, pulling away and moving backwards.  
  
“Why?” Regina asked to no one, as Emma was disappearing once more in front of her eyes. She instinctively held on to the well, then looked down at her own hand. A cold chill ran through her spine: the dagger had disappeared with Emma.

  
*********************************************************

 

“Where did you go after you disappeared with the dagger?” Regina asked. That had been her last memory from their time in Camelot.  
  
“Moms,” came Henry’s voice from not too far away behind them, they both turned around, and looked at him running toward them “you did it.”  
  
“Henry?” Regina was the first one to react, disbelief in her voice “I used blood magic to keep you inside the house. How did you get out?”  
  
“You forgot I followed you almost everywhere these past few days, I learned a trick or two. I might also have accidentally stolen one of your potions from the vault,” he said with a half apologetic smirk, now standing tall next to his moms still on the ground.  
  
“We’ll talk about it later,” she conceded, knowing there were more pressing matters to discuss.  
  
“Here,” said Emma, offering her her hand the second she was on her feet.  
  
Regina took it and got up as well. They both turned around to face their son. The moment they did so, he threw himself in their arms, holding on to both of them tightly. They hugged him back just as tightly, a matching smile on their lips.  
  
As he let go seconds after, he looked at Regina with a big smile on his face.  
  
“I knew you could do it, save ma.”  
  
Then he turned around to face his other mother, then hugged her once more.  
  
“You are back! I knew you could fight the darkness.”  
  
“I am, kid.” Emma smiled into the embrace, holding Henry close to herself. She had missed him the most during her time trying to distance herself from the people she loved.  
  
“What did you do with your grandparents?” Regina asked as the other two let go of each other.  
  
A throat clearing not too far away from them made the women jump on the spot.  
  
“Relax,” said Henry, shaking his head “it’s just grandma and grandpa.”  
  
Just like that Snow and Charming came into view, baby Neal in Charming’s arms.  
  
“You have been there the whole time?” asked Emma now “how much of it did you see?”  
  
“Enough,” replied Snow with a small smile “we held back when we realized there was no danger.”  
  
“You also looked like you needed some privacy,” finished Charming, a smile on his face as well.  
  
Emma and Regina both turned to look at the other: they couldn’t believe they actually knew what privacy meant.  
  
“Then I got too eager, and ... you know the rest,” said Henry.  
  
Everyone laughed shortly at that, then silence fell.  
  
Emma looked at her parents still a few feet away. She open her mouth for a moment, then closed it again. Regina sensing her nervousness lightly took her hand in hers and squeezed in encouragement.  
  
“Mom. Dad,” she said at last “I... I’m sorry.”  
  
“We are the ones that need to apologize,” said Snow tearing up “we failed you.”  
  
“You didn’t,” replied Emma, shaking her head no. She squeezed Regina’s hand back, then moved toward her parents.  
  
Snow got closer first, taking her daughter’s head between her hands, and kissed her forehead. Her vision blurry from all the tears.   
  
Charming smiled at the scene, tears falling from his eyes as well; baby Neal placing a hand on his now wet cheek.  
He waited till his wife moved a few steps back, and he reached them.  
As a well oiled machine they moved without thinking: Snow took the baby from his arms, and moved aside. Charming got in front of Emma and smiled brightly at his daughter. He then proceeded to hug her, waited for her to hug him back, then he softly placed a hand on the back of his daughter’s head.  
  
“We are glad you are okay,” he said, not letting her go.  
  
Not having moved an inch, Regina was standing there, admiring the scene from afar. She was really touched by it, but had no tear left in her for the day. She instinctively wrapped her arm around her son’s shoulders, causing him to lean his head on her shoulder.  
  
What felt like an eternity later, Snow looked in their direction and nodded, her smile as big as ever.  
  
“Granny’s?” she asked everyone present, her eyes not leaving Regina’s “we have a lot to talk about.”  
  


* * *

  
  
“Let me get this straight,” said Snow, once they had gone over everything that had led to that night’s events. She then looked at Regina and her daughter sitting in front of her, shoulder to shoulder, and blushed. “I mean, not straight... as in ...”  
  
Emma and Regina exchanged a look; Charming looked at his wife in amusement, wrapping a arm around her shoulder in encouragement. Henry flat out started laughing.  
  
“I wouldn’t be so joyful if I were you,” said Emma to everyone’s surprise “your mom hasn’t forgotten about your little thief act.”  
  
“Maaaa,” he whined back, suddenly becoming very serious again “maybe she had.”  
  
“No, I did not,” said Regina, looking at their son lower his head at that, then winked at Emma.  
  
“Anyway,” continued Emma, placing her hand on Regina’s thigh under the table “go on, mom. You were saying?”  
  
Snow took a sip of water from the glass in front of her, then cleared her throat. They were waiting for Granny to bring out their orders.  
  
“What I was about to ask was... he really did it?”  
  
Emma nodded slowly, almost solemnly.  
  
“He really did kill Merlin?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“What a shame,” said Regina, almost thinking out loud “he had such good dimples.”  
  
“Regina!” exclaimed Snow horrified “the man is dead.”  
  
“She is right,” said Charming with a chuckle, his eyes sparkling “he did have such a beautiful face.”  
  
Snow widened her eyes at her husband, not because he was showing attraction to someone else. She knew he would never cheat on her with anyone; man or woman. She was shocked at the lack of tact she thought he was showing. She then slowly turned her attention to her daughter.  
  
“Aren’t you going to make some weird comment like that?”  
  
“Me?” asked Emma, almost offended “I can not relate.”  
  
Snow tilted her head, then she nodded in understanding. Well, at least it looked like she understood.  
  
“But hey,” Emma continued, raising both her hands up “as far as dudes go, he was a good looking dude.”  
  
“Can we just get to the bottom of this?” asked Snow in an exasperated tone of voice.  
  
Before Henry could make one of his funny comments, both his moms looked at him at the same time.  
  
“Don’t,” they both said, causing him to repress his laughter.  
  
Snow shook her head at them all, she wasn’t going to get all the facts straight. Not for the night, at least.

 

* * *

 

  
  
Much like the night when Emma had turned into the Dark One, as soon as they were done with talking to the Charmings, they had headed toward the mansion. This time though, besides the fact that they were three of them walking down Main Street, the atmosphere felt decidedly lighter. A big weight had been lifted off their shoulders the moment Regina and Emma had shared a True Love kiss. There were obviously still things left for them to discuss, but nothing so pressing that didn’t allow them to breath more freely.  
  
The moment they had stepped outside Granny’s, after having said goodbye to her parents, they had instinctively started to walk in the same direction. Henry was a few steps ahead of them, wanting to give his two moms some privacy, but knowing they would both want to keep an eye on him.  
  
On their way home, he had furtively turned around a few times, he was curious to know how they would act around each other now that their feelings for one another were out in the open. What he witnessed was his moms slowly, very slowly, closing the gap between them. When they  had left Granny’s, although they were walking side by side, there was a foot or so separating them. In the following couple of minutes, they started getting closer, inch by inch, ending with their arms almost brushing together. The back of their hands almost touched as well, but neither one of the two seemed to be able to proceed with the next final step. As they were almost at their gate, he turned around one last time, noticing they were finally holding hands. He turned ahead again, smiling and shaking his head: he felt as he had just witnessed their whole relationship unfold in front of his eyes all over again.  
  
As soon as he got to the front door open, he sprinted past the foyer and up the stairs, mumbling a low ‘goodnight, moms’. He was hoping that giving them their so much needed privacy would somehow make them forget about the whole stealing the potion situation.  
  
They both followed him with their eyes, then almost simultaneously looked at their still conjoined hands.  
  
“So...” started Emma “what happens now?”  
  
“Would you like a glass of apple cider?”  
  
Emma responded with a nod and shy smile.  
  
They reluctantly let go of each other; Regina heading to the kitchen to grab a couple of glasses. Emma gently closing the door behind her, then heading to Regina’s study.  
She walked inside it, flicked the light on, and sat on one of the couches, waiting for the other woman to join her. She looked around as she did so: she was unable to shake off the sense of déjà-vu she got from the situation. Of course there were a lot of differences with the first time she had set eye on Regina. Similarly to their first meeting, though, they had something important to discuss.  
  
A couple of minutes after, Regina stopped at the door, apple cider in both hands. She leaned her right shoulder against the door frame, admiring Emma’s stoic face for just a split moment.  
She walked inside the study, her heels clicking against the wooden floor clearly not loud enough to bring the other woman back to the present. She pushed the door close with her shoulder, then cleared her throat.  
  
Emma looked up at her, smiling widely, then she let her gaze trail off down Regina’s body.  
  
“Are you okay?” she questioned, sitting opposite the other, and placing the glasses on the coffee table between them.  
  
“I was thinking.” Emma’s smile turned into a serious one, before she leaned forward to grab the glass and take a generous gulp out of it.  
  
“About?” Regina shifted on the spot, hands running up and down her thighs.  
  
“That first night,” she replied, twirling the glass in her hand, her eyes focused on the golden liquid “do you remember it?”  
  
“I do.” She drew a sharp breath, she did remember indeed. It hadn’t been that long since she had reminisced about that same particular night.  
  
“This,” Emma said looking around the room, her shoulders more relaxed now “all of this, reminded me of that night.”  
  
Regina took a small sip from her own glass, and nodded in agreement. The awkwardness in the air was palpable.  
  
“I...” they both said at the same. And at the same time they both stopped talking again.  
  
Regina leaned forward, being careful not to break the eye contact, and placed the glass next to Emma’s.  
  
Emma leaned backward, the couch felt very cozy against her back.  
  
“You go ahead, she said at last “you probably have a lot of questions.”  
  
“Can we go over everything again?” Regina asked, her hands carefully placed on her knees “is that okay with you?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“That week you and Merlin disappeared, you...?”  
  
“He was trying to train me to tune out all the Dark Ones in my head. I needed to be stronger than them in order to push them away, and fight the darkness.”  
  
At the slight tremble of Regina’s lower lip, she continued her explanation.  
  
“We went away because we... I... was afraid to hurt you, Henry. All of you.”  
  
“You said you were able to do so, right?” she waited for the other to nod in response, then she continued “how come we ended up with the curse?”  
  
“After our encounter in the woods, I realized the Dark Ones had already set everything in place with Hook’s help. They had been able to persuade him through me.” Cold sweat ran down her back at the mere thought of being controlled like that “they promised him they’d help him fulfill his revenge once and for all. In exchange, he was supposed to cast the curse to bring everyone back to Storybrooke.”  
  
“And that’s when he killed Merlin?”  
  
“Yes. His ex, Nimue, she was a Dark One. The very first one, to be exact. She and Hook used me to crush his heart. I...”  
  
“Hey,” Regina said gently “we can stop here for the night.”  
  
That was everything she had shared with the rest of the family as well. Except the part about being used to kill the wizard.  
  
“No, no,” Emma said firmly “I need to get it out sooner or later.”  
  
Regina smiled softly at her. She watched Emma as she took another big gulp of the cider, and placed the empty glass back on the coffee table.  
  
“Why did the Dark Ones need to come to Storybrooke?”  
  
“They were planning on coming back from the Underworld. They needed to take the place of as many living souls as possible.”  
  
“Us?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“That’s why you stabbed yourself? To prevent them from bringing their plan to term?”  
  
“Yes,” Emma said again “I even tried the sleeping potion Merlin had given me in case we needed to buy some more time, but it was the only way to stop them. The only way I was sure I would keep you safe.”  
  
“Oh, Emma,” Regina replied with her softest voice yet, she could still feel Emma’s cold body under her fingertips.  
  
“Where is Hook, anyway?”  
  
Emma shrugged, she had tried to track him down in the last three days, but there hadn’t been any result.  
  
“The Apprentice’s wand... there is no way of using it to track him down?” Emma suggested “in case he is in another realm. Or simply, back in Camelot.”  
  
“I’m afraid not,” Regina replied shaking her head “it only works if the one looking deeply loves the one that needs to be found.”  
  
She closed her eyes, taking in a few breaths, then she opened them again.  
  
“There is no way then. We should just tell...”  
  
“... Belle to keep an eye on Rumple in case he comes back for his revenge?”  
  
Emma smiled at that, she had missed being so in sync with the other woman. She had missed having her around at all. Then she remembered...  
  
“Have you found out what happened to Robin? And Roland?”  
  
“I didn’t,” she replied, thinking back at her recent visit into the woods “I have asked the Merry Men, but there was no sign of either Hood or Roland with them. They had no idea where they could be.”  
  
Emma looked at her carefully: she wanted to ask a question, but was afraid to. She opened her mouth, then closed it again, no sound escaping from it.  
  
“Just like Hook, I have no way to track them if they are in a different realm,” Regina said; she had guessed the question swirling around her mind “I have tried normal tracking, but got no result.”  
  
They sat there in silence for at least five minutes. Regina finished the rest of her cider, then she leaned back on the couch, taking in everything Emma had told her.  
  
“Can we talk about the elephant in the room?” She asked after she had gone through everything again in her mind.  
  
“The kiss?” asked Emma, sitting upright.  
  
“No. Your hair!”  
  
“What about it?” she asked, instinctively bringing a hand to her locks.  
  
“Why did you dye it?”  
  
“How did you notice?”  
  
Regina raised an eyebrow, but she replied nonetheless.  
  
“When Charming hugged you earlier, his hand got all silver after he placed it on your head. He went home to a surprise on his pants, since he rubbed the stuff off on his right leg. I don’t think he noticed.”  
  
Emma let out a small chuckle at that, then yawned involuntarily.  
  
“Emma.” The name coming out of Regina’s mouth almost like a whisper “when was the last time you had a good night sleep?”  
  
“Well,” she replied, licking her dry lips “what I had three days go would probably be considered an afternoon nap, so... three weeks ago? Give or take.”  
  
Regina’s expression soften up even more at that. Not that the answer was a big surprise to her, she knew Dark Ones didn’t sleep. What caused that reaction was knowing how Emma must have been feeling: she hadn’t been able to sleep that well since that famous night, and she hadn’t had her mind full of people trying to control her. She hadn’t stabbed herself to death just hours before either.  
  
“Come here,” she said at last, patting the empty space next to her on the couch “you should get some sleep.”  
  
“Are you sure?” Emma questioned with a tilt of her head, clearly still slightly embarrassed “we were in the middle of a conversation.”  
  
“There is time for that,” she said firmly, beckoning her to the couch.  
  
Emma got up, slowly walking the couple of feet separating them, and sat at the empty spot. She then turned around to face the other and smiled. Or at least she tried to, another yawn escaped her; this time she had been able to cover her mouth in time.  
  
“Here,” said Regina, her eyes still as soft as ever. She patted on her own lap “place your head here.”  
  
Emma raised an eyebrow at the unexpected request, then she leaned down on the couch; she placed her head on Regina’s lap and looked up at her.  
  
“Hey.”  
  
“Hey,” Regina replied, looking down at her.  
  
Emma momentarily closed her eyes, enjoying the feeling of Regina’s warm and soft legs under her head, then she opened them again.  
  
“Can I ask you something?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“Do you think things would have worked out for the better if we had given in to our attraction when I first came to Storybrooke?”  
  
Regina bit her lower lip at the question, and titled her head, eyes still focused on the other woman.  
  
“I mean... I think there was mutual attraction from the start.”  
  
“There was.” Regina smiled “to answer your question: no, I don’t think it would have worked out better that way.”  
  
“Why?” she asked, widening her eyes.  
  
“For starters, I would have had to keep on lying to you, causing you and your super power to go haywire,” she replied, not missing a bit; she had clearly thought about it before “secondly, the moment the curse had been broken, and you’d have found out everything I had kept from you, you wouldn’t have wanted to be in the same room with me. Let alone have some sort of relationship.”  
  
“Why do you always have to be the voice of reason?” Emma asked a few minutes after having thought through everything she had just been told.  
  
“Someone has to be,” Regina replied with a wink.  
  
“Hey,” she tried protesting, but ended up yawning. She then closed her eyes, a soft smile on her lips. “I’m still awake, by the way.”  
  
“I didn’t really like having to see the pirate around you all the time, though,” Regina whispered to herself.  
  
“It wasn’t fun having to watch you and Hood either,” her voice trailing off as she was about to fall asleep any second.  
  
Regina made a blanket appear on her, just as Emma was starting to shiver.  
  
“Go to sleep now,” she said, placing a hand on Emma’s head, the dye sticking to it reminding her they’d need to wash it out completely as soon as possible “we’ll talk more tomorrow.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Emma said, in a soft whisper.  
  
“About?”  
  
“You having to see me with Hook.”  
  
“Don’t worry about it,” Regina caressed Emma’s head, and watched as she fell asleep completely. Not too long after, she fell asleep as well.  
  
Emma woke up almost in a panic a few hours later. Or at least she felt like she was in a state of panic. Her dreams had been filled so much of the last couple of weeks’ events that for a split moment between being asleep and awake she thought her family was still in danger. In reality, she had simply opened her eyes, snapping out of the nightmare. She hadn’t even moved an inch from the position she had fallen asleep in. The moment she realized where she was, and felt Regina’s warm legs against her head, she breathed a sigh of relief. She then spotted the blanket halfway down her legs, and smiled grateful at what had obviously been Regina’s thoughtful gesture. She grabbed it, being extra careful not to wake the other woman, and wrapped it around herself.  
Being all cozy again, she looked up at a still sleeping Regina, then went back to sleep immediately.


	5. Chapter 5

Regina opened her eyes hours later, feeling her back a bit sore for the weird position they had fallen asleep in, but otherwise fully rested. She brought both hands to her face, rubbing her eyes gently, before looking down at the seemingly peaceful sleeping woman leaned on her lap. She smiled at the sight in front of her: in her sleep, Emma had turned around on the side and was now facing her belly, her hair were splayed all over her legs and cascading down her knees. She had expected her to move a lot more in her sleep since she had always thought of Emma as someone who can’t stand still, ever; she didn’t think sleep would be an exception to that. Maybe it was just a momentarily thing caused by how tired she had been the night before, and how long it had been since she had last had the chance to rest a full night. Regina thought that maybe in a few nights, and in a proper bed, Emma would be tossing around in her sleep. She snapped out of her thoughts before she started thinking about scenarios in her head that she didn’t know they were an actual possibility. They had indeed shared a True Love Kiss, but that didn’t mean Emma wanted to start sharing a bed, or even start a relationship at all. She shook her head again, her mind had tricked her to go back to those scenarios. She then looked down again, flicked her hand in front of her face, and made a pillow appear between Emma’s head and her thighs. A second later, poofing herself just beside the couch, she leaned over to re-adjust the blanket on a still sleeping Emma, and lightly caressed her cheek.  
  
She grabbed the shoes she had slipped off her feet before going to sleep, and tiptoed out of the study. She felt like she needed to warn Belle about the possible treat to Rumple’s life as soon as possible. Walking into the kitchen, she looked up at the wall clock, realizing it was only 6:18 am. She took a deep breath, and decided that maybe she had time for a long, warm shower before going there. Since Belle usually opened Gold’s shop at 7 am, she thought she could at least have the decency to wait till then before barging in and bringing potential bad news.  
  
At 7:06 she was standing just outside Gold’s shop, the sign on the door already turned to the ‘Open’ side. Her hair falling almost down to her shoulders were still a bit damp and curlier than usual, almost as curly as it was in its natural state. She had spent more time in the shower than she had expected, letting the hot water fall on her body as she thought of everything that had happened the night before. That had left her very little time to dry her hair, not allowing her to go through her usual haircare routine. Actually, she hadn’t allowed herself to go through it, she was anxious to talk to Belle. It was true her and Rumple had had their problems and differences over the years, but he was still her oldest friend. Plus, Belle had been extremely helpful to her during their search for Emma, especially back in Camelot. She hadn’t even told anyone about her feelings for the Charmings’ spawn; that’s what Regina used to call Emma in her head when she first got to Storybrooke. She owed it to the bookworm to warn her as soon as possible. The ‘people in love with ex Dark Ones’ club seemed more and more likely to happen; not officially, of course, but thinking about it comforted her somehow.  
She took a final breath before placing her hand on the doorknob and turning it. She pushed the door open, and stepped into the shop, her eyes adjusting to the dim light inside. The bell warning when a guest was inside stopped ringing behind her. It sounded way louder than usual, or maybe it was because she hadn’t actually been inside the shop in weeks. Belle had offered to help her find a solution to their lack of memory problem, but they had mostly worked at her vault or at the library. In the meantime, she had helped her in finding a way to wake Rumple as well.  
  
“Just a second,” came Belle’s muffled voice.  
  
She walked slowly toward the counter, stopping to look at the various familiar objects all around the room.  
  
“Welcome to…” started Belle, appearing from behind the curtain, her voice was a bit strained, yet it still sounded cordial “Oh! Hey, Regina.”  
  
“Everything okay?” she asked, genuinely worried.  
  
“Yes. Yes, everything is fine.” Her face lit up with a smile “I see I was right after all: the feelings were, and are, mutual. And as I now recall, I have told you in Camelot as well.”  
  
“You already know?”  
  
“If I hadn’t felt the True Love magic myself, I would have still gotten the news fast enough.”  
  
Regina raised an eyebrow in question.  
  
“Grumpy. As I was closing for the day last night, he came running with the news of the, and I quote, the Savior and the Queen having just shared a True Love kiss at the docks.” She chuckled recalling the night before “If he had magic, he would have probably been carrying around newspapers. Pictures on the first page included.”  
  
Regina rolled her eyes at the mere thought of that happening.  
  
“I’m sorry, I’m sure you are not here to hear all about Grumpy’s adventures,” said Belle moments later, placing her hands on the glass counter “did you need anything?”  
  
“Actually, yes,” she replied, her voice serious. She explained her almost everything Emma had told her; everything it was necessary for her to know.  
  
“Do you really think he could just come barging here and kill Rumple?” Belle asked, a finger lightly tapping on the counter.  
  
“He has been trying to do so for centuries, hasn’t he? And he did say he was after his revenge,” Regina said with wit in her voice “he hasn’t made a move so far, not that we are aware of. We don’t even know where he is, but better take precautions now, than be sorry later on.”  
  
“You are right.” She nodded, her mind already thinking of the various books to go through in order to protect Rumple and herself “thank you for the heads up.”  
  
“No problem,” Regina said with a soft smile “speaking of which: have you had any luck waking Rumple?”  
  
Belle shook her head no, resuming the nervous tapping of her finger.  
  
“I keep coming back to one solution: True Love’s kiss. Which I have tried several times, obviously with no result. And the rose is almost at its last petal as well.”  
  
“When did you last try?”  
  
“Three days ago, why?”  
  
“Something tells me it is going to work now, if you give it another try.”  
  
“Right now?”  
  
“Sure, why not? I’ll keep watch of the shop while you do that.”  
  
Regina watched as Belle nodded at her, a new found hope on her face, then disappeared behind the curtain to the back of the shop.  
  
She turned on her heels, her feet almost automatically guiding her to a specific corner of the room. She stopped as soon as she came face to face with Emma’s unicorn mobile. Or at least what was supposed to be her mobile. She felt a pang to the stomach, the guilty feeling of having involuntarily caused Emma so much pain in the past was still very much present in her. Even with their relationship having evolved that much over the years. She decided to add it to the list of things to talk about with Emma as soon as possible.  
The moment she reached up, her fingers lightly closing around one of the blue unicorns, the True Love kiss magic came flashing out of the back of the shop. She smiled to herself.  
  
Ten minutes or so later, she heard someone call for her. She retraced her steps back to the counter. Belle and Rumple were waiting for her on the other side of it.  
  
“Look who is back from the dead,” she exclaimed with a grin on her face.  
  
“I wasn’t among the dead,” said Rumple, pushing his weight on his cane “trust me, I have been there before, I’d recognize that dreadful place anywhere.”  
  
She nodded, furrowing her brows, trying to imagine such a place.  
  
“I hear it’s you I have to thank you for this,” he continued, his voice sounded somehow softer.  
  
“I think your wife deserves most of the credit here.”  
  
“Still, thank you.” He attempted a small smile, while reaching for Belle’s hand with his free one.  
  
“You were right,” said Regina looking at a smiling Belle “there really is a man behind the beast. I can clearly see it now that the Dark One’s powers are gone.”  
  
Belle smiled even wider, if that was even possible, and she nodded proud. She had seen it all along.  
  
“Speaking of which,” he said “I have to apologize to the Savior. Everything I have done…” He was clearly lost for words, it all sounded sincere though. It seemed like what the Apprentice had said about Rumple starting on a clean state was true.  
  
“What you need right now is to take it easy,” Belle told him firmly.  
  
“She is right. So does Emma anyway. You both need some peace and quiet. We will have time for pleasantries later on. And you need a protection spell around this place.” She turned to Belle once again, and asked: “Did you tell him everything?”  
  
“I am going over all the details later on, but yes, he is up to speed.”  
  
“Good,” she nodded “I’ll cast the spell, and I’ll leave you two to catch up.”  
  
Rumple half nodded in response, then made his way to the back of the shop. Regina turned around, and started walking toward the door the ‘closed’ side of the sign facing her.  
  
“Wait,” said Belle as she was reaching for the doorknob.  
  
She turned on the spot and raised an eyebrow in question.  
  
“Thank you again, Regina,” she said with a warm smile, instinctively taking her hands in hers.  
  
Regina’s gaze followed the unexpected gesture closely, then she looked up and smiled back.  
  
“No need to thank me. You have been plenty helpful with whatever I needed these past weeks, it’s the least I could do.”  
  
“We helped each other then,” said Belle, letting go of Regina’s hands. She then let out an involuntary chuckle.  
  
“What?”  
  
“We are both in love with ex Dark Ones now.”  
  
“That we are,” she said, grinning. That’s what she had been thinking all along.  
  
The moment she stepped out of Gold’s shop, she made sure to cast the protection spell all around the building. She then thought of her next destinations: first Granny’s, than back at the mansion.  
  
She slowly walked down the street. It was such a beautiful morning, and already so warm at 8 o’clock, that she didn’t mind moving on foot. Plus, she was sure that if she had poofed herself inside the diner, Granny would have had her crossbow ready in hand before the smoke disappeared from around her.  
  
She arrived at her first destination, grateful that the place was half empty, that meant no one to talk to. Grumpy was seated at one of the stools at the counter, too sleepy to even look up, or make some unnecessary comment about the events of the night before.  
  
“Here you go, Leroy,” said Granny once out of the kitchen, handing him a few bags containing what looked like the dwarfs’ lunch for later in the day.   
  
He grabbed the bag, grunted loudly, then jumped off the stool.  
  
“You are welcome,” said Granny to the door, now closing with a loud thud.  
  
“What can I do for you?” she asked Regina, who was still standing behind the counter.  
  
“I’ll get a bear-claw, a chocolate frosted donut, and a blueberry muffin.” Apples were for pies and turnovers, but blueberries… those were delicious for muffins. “Also, two hot cocoa and a black coffee. Thank you.”  
  
Granny nodded, then put together all the pastries in one bag, and placed it on the counter, next to the money Regina had just put there. “It’s going to be a few more minutes for the beverages,” she said, tilting her head toward one of the stools. A silent invitation to sit down.  
  
Regina did so, looking around the place, not really knowing what to do or say.  
  
“I’m glad,” continued Granny, while placing the money in the register, counting the change to give her back.  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
Granny placed the change right next to the brown bag, then kept talking.  
  
“I’m glad Emma has found someone like you. I never thought I’d say something like this… you have become a good person, Regina.”  
  
“Thank you,” she replied with a small smile.  
  
“Also,” Granny continued, while putting a lid on the to go cup with her coffee in it, and starting on the cocoa. She was apparently in a talkative mood “I was afraid Emma would end up with that filthy pirate. He reminded me so much of Ruby’s Peter. The poor boy ended up being eaten, and maybe that was for the best. He wouldn’t have been a good match for my granddaughter. I see Emma as a sort of granddaughter of mine. I still remember knitting her baby blanket.”  
  
Regina nodded in understanding.  
  
Granny put lids on both the hot cocoa she had ordered, not forgetting the cinnamon first, then placed all three beverages in a carry out tray.  
  
“I do hope my Ruby is going to find someone that matches her free spirit,” she said with a sigh.  
  
“She is still out there trying to find her pack, isn’t she?”  
  
Granny nodded.  
  
Regina got off the stool, and grabbed both bag and tray in her hands.  
  
“Thank you,” she repeated again, then turned on her heels.  
  
“You forgot your change,” Granny said, holding up the bills.  
  
She turned around from her place in front of the open door, and with a smile said: “keep it.” She then walked out of the diner into the sunny day.  
  


 

* * *

  
  
On her way home, she wondered if her loving the highly adored Savior had anything to do with people being even more friendly with her; and somehow more accepting. She could already imagine what Emma would say to that: ‘You are a hero, Regina. Everyone can see that. It has nothing to do with me.’ She would disagree though, it absolutely had something to do with her. If it wasn’t for Emma’s arrival in town, she would have never been set up on the hard and rocky road to change.  
  
She walked inside the mansion, closing the door behind her. Her morning that far had consisted of opening and closing of doors, or at least that’s how it felt. There were another couple of those to open: the one to her study, and the one to Henry’s bedroom, in order to wake him and Emma up for breakfast. Not to talk about the metaphorical ones her and Emma would have to walk through when they would continue their serious conversation started the night before. She placed everything she had in her hands on the table in the foyer. Then she removed her shoes, placing them in their usual place, and walked toward the study.  
  
She gently pushed the door open, and whispered Emma’s name. At no sign of having being heard, she approached the couch. Emma was now lying on her back, an arm hanging off the couch, one hand propped on her stomach, the blanket on the floor with only one corner barely hanging from her foot. She was snoring, but it was barely perceptible.  
  
“Emma?” she called her again, slightly raising her voice now. At the still no sign of her waking up, she kneeled down next to the couch.  
  
“Emma,” she said a third time. She made the pastry bag appear in her hand and she placed it open directly under Emma’s nose “I got breakfast.”  
  
“Dibs on the bear-claw,” she said, snapping awake.  
  
Regina removed her hand just in time to avoid pastries flying out the bag.  
  
“Hi,” said Emma, as she opened her eyes. She smiled almost shyly.   
  
“Hi,” said Regina back “how are you feeling?”  
  
“Better.” Her stomach protested loudly “Hungry.”  
  
Regina got on her feet, and extended a hand for her to take.  
  
Emma took it, then she lightly bit on her own lower lip “I gotta use the bathroom first.”  
  
“You do that, while I set up for breakfast in the kitchen, then I’ll go wake Henry up.”  
  
“Can I do that?” she asked. Then at Regina’s head tilt, she added: “wake Henry up. I haven’t done it in so long.”  
  
“Sure.” Regina smiled, then squeezed her hands still in hers “I’ll wait for you two in the kitchen.”

 

* * *

  
  
  
Sitting in silence at the kitchen island, the three of them enjoyed the breakfast Regina had brought home. Henry was still keeping quiet in the hope that his two moms would forget about his being in trouble. He slowly gazed from one to the other from behind his cup every time he took a sip. His donut all gone after only a few big bites.  
Soon after, he jumped off the stool, took the last sip of his hot cocoa, and finally cleaned up his side of the table. Paper cup, napkin, crumbles… all in the bin.  
He then stood with a hand on the stool he had just used, and cleared his throat. That cause his moms to look up from their food.  
  
“I was thinking,” he said, looking in Regina’s direction out of habit “that maybe I can go to grandma and grandpa’s for a little while?” He ended the phrase more like a question to make sure they knew the decision was up to them.  
  
“If that’s okay with your mother,” said Regina, looking at Emma. She wanted to be sure she would be fine with it after having spent so much time away from their son. Maybe she wanted to spent some time with him. “then it is okay with me.”  
  
“Me?” Emma asked confused. She first looked back at Regina, and then turned around to face Henry “Sure, kid. Have fun.”  
  
“Awesome,” he exclaimed. He went up to his room to get changed, and then he was out the house in no time.  
  
“What’s so interesting for a thirteen year old at your parents’ house?” Regina asked, before taking a sip of her coffee.  
  
“I think mom is teaching him how to use her bow.”  
  
“She is what?” she exclaimed, almost spitting out her coffee.  
  
“I thought you knew. I saw them the other day. From afar, of course, but that’s what it looked like she was doing.”  
  
“Of course I didn’t know.”  
  
“Hey,” said Emma, reaching for her hand on the table “I’m sure she knows what she is doing.”  
  
Regina let Emma take her hand, and nodded in a very non convincing way.  
  
“I’ll tell you what,” continued Emma “we’ll check on them every thirty minutes. Twenty, if that makes you feel better.”  
  
“Fine,” she agreed, then downed the rest of the coffee.  
  
Emma took the last bite of her bear-claw, and the last sip of her cocoa. She would usually be faster than that; today she needed to taste every little bit of it.  
  
“Hey,” Emma said again, rubbing her thumb on Regina’s palm “how about we continue the conversation I interrupted last night?”  
  
“I thought you’d want to wash that silver out of your hair first.”  
  
“Who says we can’t do both at the same time?”“You want me to get in the shower with you?” Regina widen her eyes at the idea.  
  
“While I do appreciate the suggestion, I think a bath would be more practical for the talking part.”  
  
“You want to get in the bath together?”  
  
“Again, while I wouldn’t mind the idea,” she said with a smirk “I was thinking you could keep me company while I washed this whole experience off. Literally.” She pointed a finger at her own head, then she quickly added: “If that’s okay with you, of course.”  
  
“Sure,” replied Regina slightly flustered “of course it is.”  
  


 

* * *

 

 

  
Emma dipped a finger into the rising water of the bathtub. Regina’s huge bathtub in her private bathroom. She had told, more exclaimed, how huge it was as soon as Regina had led her to it. It was big enough for the two of them to actually share and still be comfortable.  
The water had finally reached her preferred temperature: she turned the tap off. She then stepped out of her underwear, and stepped into the warm water, immediately lying completely in it. Well, except for her head. Regina had showed her a vanilla scented body wash, which she now squirted a good amount of in the water.  
  
As bubbles started forming all around and over her body, she called out for the other woman waiting in the adjacent room. “Regina? Aren’t you coming?”  
  
Just seconds later, she appeared at the door, chair in her hands. She walked inside, placed it strategically where she could easily face Emma, without being too close to look like she was ogling her. They had only just kissed after all… okay, it was a True Love kiss, so it had to be more important, but still… they had kissed. She was still getting used to it.  
  
“Regina?”  
  
She looked at the woman in her bathtub currently moving the soap bubbles around, and murmured a low ‘sorry’. She walked to the door in order to close it, then she sat down at the chair.  
  
“Sorry,” she repeated more clearly “did you say something?”  
  
“Yeah… I asked if it was okay of me to say yes to Henry. You know, since what he did last night.”  
  
“I think, considering the situation, and the fact that nobody was injured because of it, we can let it slide. Plus…” she furrowed her eyebrows in concentration.  
  
“Plus…” she continued “he did all the usual stuff I insist on when he is grounded: he went to bed right away, cleaned up after himself, and actually asked for permission, instead of announcing his plans.”  
  
“Wow. You really do have this down. I’m still struggling with deciding if I want to be a fun parent or…”  
  
“It takes practice,” said Regina “if you want, you can tell him how stealing has led you to jail.”  
  
“I already tried that, once,” Emma recalled with a chuckle “it didn’t go well.”  
  
“When?”  
  
“That time he stole your keys to prove that you had framed Mary Margaret. Don’t get me wrong… I was happy to do the same at the time. But him stealing… I sat him down and told him all about the reasons why I had been put in jail. Excluding Neal’s part, of course. He wasn’t aware of Neal at the time. He listened to me carefully, then put his serious face on. And you know what he told me?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“He said that, and I quote, ‘not even my mom would be mad at me once I remind her that if you hadn’t been in jail the moment I was born, she would have never adopted me. Stealing isn’t always wrong.’ He was only ten.”  
  
“He is good,” replied Regina, just a hint of pride behind it.  
  
“He takes it all from you.”  
  
“Being modest, aren’t we, Miss Swan?”  
  
Emma raised an eyebrow, and grimaced at that.  
  
“Sorry. You just brought me back in time for a moment.”  
  
Emma nodded in understanding, then silence fell. She dropped her hands to the bottom of the tub, letting them rest flat at either side of her body.  
  
“So…” Regina started, crossing her legs, and placing both of her hands on her knee.  
  
“So… you wanted to know about the hair?”  
  
“Yes.”   
  
“Remember when I went away with Merlin?”  
  
Regina nodded again. Of course she remembered. She had been in panic mode the entire week the two had been gone. She did have the dagger still on her, summoning Emma to them hadn’t been an option though. Snow and Charming were having their own drama with Arthur, Guinevere, and an apparently back from the dead Lancelot. She hadn’t even been fully aware of what was happening with them all but she knew that if Arthur had gotten his hands on the dagger, Emma’s life would have been put in grave danger. The two idiots had warned her about it, thankfully. Not after she had to lift the spell Arthur had put on both in order to control them, of course.   
She was glad that in all this, she had had the help and support of both Henry and Belle.  
  
“During the training to take control over the Dark Ones in my head, I had a vision. Or at least I thought it was a vision. It was me dressed in that black body suit and I had silver hair; there was dark magic emanating from my every pore.”  
  
“So, once we landed here, and I was still wearing my Camelot robe, with my dark magic mostly in check… well, I had to improvise. Without using more dark magic than necessary, of course. It was also a good way to make you all think I was the big bad guy, in order to keep you away from me. Therefore safe. Not that you actually kept away that much.”  
  
Regina lowered her head at that, it had been hard fighting the urge to barge in Emma’s new house for those three days.  
  
“Anyway, did you know hair dye doesn’t stick very well to Dark Ones’ hair?” continued Emma. “And apparently doesn’t really stick once you have stopped being one?”  
  
“I didn’t. But I have noticed.” Regina recalled Charming’s silver stained hand and pants. “Why do you think it might have not been a vision?”  
  
“Because I never got to that place… to have that much darkness in me. I only looked the part. I think it was another trick from the Dark Ones.” Emma shivered saying that last part.  
  
“Did the water get cold already?”  
  
“No, the water is fine.”  
  
“Emma…” said Regina, understating the reason behind the shivering “we can take it easy. We have time to talk about all of it, if you want.”  
  
“Okay,” she replied with a small smile, grabbing the shampoo. She applied a generous amount to her hair, and started massaging her scalp.  
  
“Could you check if I got all the dye out?” she asked, pointing at the back of her head after the first rinse.  
  
Regina brought herself to the present, and nodded. In the meantime, she had been lost in her thoughts.  
  
“There are still a few spots here and there,” she said once she was standing right behind Emma’s head.  
  
“Where? Here?” Emma tried to reach those spots with her hands, with no success.  
  
Regina knelt down, took Emma’s hands in hers, and placed them on the still stained locks.  
  
“Oh,” Emma exclaimed at the unexpected touch “Do you mind helping me with those? You have a better visual.”  
  
“Using magic?” asked Regina “You should lean forward a bit more so I clean the tub as well.”  
  
It had been a never ending cycle of Emma’s hair staining the ceramic behind her head and vice-versa. Every time she leaned forward she’d clean her hair, but every time she had leaned backwards, it took back some of the dye still stuck on the tub.  
  
“No, not with magic,” said Emma, turning her body around to face her, exposing part of her breast “sit here?”  
  
“Are you sure?” asked Regina. She had been ready at the idea of Emma potentially needing some space, even after the True Love kiss shared. But apparently she was craving closeness just as much as she was.  
  
“Of course,” she smiled, then moved forward in order to leave some leg space for Regina.  
  
Regina carefully removed her slippers and her pants, leaving the stockings on. She then entered the tub, placing her feet just behind Emma. Finally, she sat down on the edge, which was wide enough for her to sit comfortably.  
  
“I’m ready.” she said.  
  
Emma moved a bit backward again, leaning her back against Regina’s legs. “Same here.”  
  
Regina applied some more shampoo to her hair, and started massaging it.  
  
“There is something I’d like to talk about,” said Emma, just as Regina had moved on to the conditioner.  
  
“What is it?”  
  
“I’d like to talk about the kiss. Our kiss,” she said in a serious tone.  
  
“Look, Emma… just because it was a True Love kiss, doesn’t mean…”  
  
“Regina!”  
  
“What?”  
  
“You do realize my naked back is pressed against your legs right this moment?”  
  
“I… uhm…”  
  
“What I wanted to say was… I would like to do that again; if you do too, of course.”  
  
“I do, too.”  
  
Emma refrained the urge to shake her head. She thought she was going to be the one who was going to act weird because she couldn’t believe Regina actually had feelings for her. She hadn’t taken into consideration the fact that Regina wasn’t used to someone choosing her on their own accord. Especially someone that herself had chosen in return.  
  
“Emma?” she said after a few more minutes had passed.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“There are still a few things we need to discuss.”  
  
“I know. Not right now though.”  
  
“Okay.” Regina resumed her ministration, rinsing the conditioner off her hair.  
  
Emma closed her eyes at that, and smiled to herself.  
  
  
  
Not too long after, Emma was wrapping a bathrobe around her body. Regina was giving her her back, hand on the doorknob, ready to step out of the bathroom and into the conjoined bedroom. Her own bedroom.  
  
“Hey,” said Emma, trailing her eyes up Regina’s legs “you have some dye stuck on the back of your calves.”  
  
Door barely a inch open in front of her, she turned around and smirked. Then she pushed the door completely open, and kept walking.   
  
A curious Emma followed her close behind.  
  
“Hey,” she repeated “did you hear me?”  
  
Regina stopped in the middle of the room, smirk still plastered on her face.  
  
“I thought you might want to help me get out of these dirty stockings.” She swayed a little as she said so, getting closer to an open-mouthed, unable to move Emma.  
  
The change of temperature from one room to the other had made her bare skin under the bathrobe get goosebumps. She had been almost cold those few seconds between stepping out of the fog filled bathroom and hearing those words come out of Regina’s mouth. Now that she was moving closer, she started to feel all hot and bothered.  
  
“Is that so?” she smirked back, after regaining control of her voice, just as Regina was wrapping her arms around her waist.  
  
“Uh-huh.”  
  
Emma brought her left hand to Regina’s cheek, brushing her thumb lightly over it. She bit her own lower lip in anticipation. Just as she was leaning in to kiss her, Regina told her to stop. Emma was about to question her further when…  
  
“Did you hear that?”  
  
As silence filled the room, they heard the front door closing a bit more loudly than usual.  
  
“Oh, shit,” exclaimed Emma “I forgot to check on Henry.”  
  
“Shhh…” said Regina, bringing a finger to the other woman’s lips; her other arm still wrapped around her middle.  
And just as she shushed her, Henry’s voice reached them. It was as he was talking at the stairs.  
  
“I don’t know, grandma.” there was a clear emphasis on the last word “When I left them, they were in the kitchen.”  
  
“Oh, he is good,” said Emma with a crooked smile, then she went pale “shit! What do we do?”  
  
Regina raised a hand in front of her, fully clothing her own self, no stain in sight. She stood on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on Emma’s cheek.  
  
“You take your time,” she said just as she was poofing herself away.  
  
To the kitchen, Emma assumed. Well, she assumed that after standing there for a couple of moments longer than necessary. That woman always found a way to leave her speechless. 

 

* * *

  
  
“Regina?” came Snow’s voice from behind her shortly after. She had poofed herself in front of the sink, turning the hot tab on to pretend she had been washing dishes all along. She put her hands under the momentary cold water, hoping it would help cool down, there wasn’t any magic in the world able to stop yourself from being turned on. She probably needed a cold shower… or a hot one shared with Emma.  
  
“Snow?” she replied, as she turned around.  
  
“Is Emma here?” she questioned, looking around the room as if she had hidden her daughter in one of the cupboards.  
  
“She is upstairs.” At Snow’s still questioning look, she added: “she went to take a shower while I washed the dishes.”  
  
“I thought you had take out breakfast from Granny’s this morning.”  
  
‘Was Snow ever able to let something slide?’ she was asking herself. And just as she was about to reply, Henry walked in the room.  
  
“So,” Regina said instead, with a raised eyebrow “you have been teaching my son how to use your bow and arrow?”  
  
Henry sat silently at one of the stools, even as he wished he had gone upstairs instead.  
  
“Charming taught him how to use the sword. And he was smaller.” Snow was already on the defensive.  
  
“I never approved of that either,” Regina said, drying off her hands, and leaning with her back against the kitchen top.  
  
They stared at each other for what felt like an eternity, when Emma walked in and called for Snow.  
  
She had used her fake surprised voice as she had said ‘mom?’ The one Regina could recognize everywhere as fake. Emma had tried to use it on her a couple of times as well. When she had realized that Regina didn’t buy it, she had stopped using it. With her, at least. With her parents… it worked like a charm.  
  
“Emma! Here you are,” Snow exclaimed, turning around to face her daughter.  
  
“Here I am,” replied Emma. Her damp hair falling down her shoulders, leaving droplets of water down the tank top she had clearly magicked there. She distractedly put her hands in her jeans’ front pockets, and blinked at her mother. She wanted to ask what the urgency was, but didn’t want to sound rude. Luckily, Snow was already about to tell her.  
  
“I thought you’d come home last night.” She was still standing in the middle of the room, her arms crossed over her chest.  
  
“Home?” Emma tilted her head in question.  
  
“The loft…”  
  
“Oh.” Emma shifted her weight from one foot to the other “I was thinking of keeping the house I have been staying in since we came back from Camelot.”  
  
“Making it legal, of course,” she added that last part looking at Regina.  
  
“That’s where you went last night? At your new house?”  
  
The two Mills looked at the whole exchange in silence. Regina once again thinking about how Snow could really not let one thing slide. Not once.  
  
“No.” Emma seemed to be unable to stay put “I slept here.”  
  
“I fell asleep on the couch,” she added before she was asked. Snow had the weird habit of making it look like she was judging your every move, when all she wanted was to pry. Not that Emma liked people who wanted to be too much in your business, either.  
  
Her eyes roamed the room as her mother was strangely not saying anything. Not yet.  
  
“So, you have been teaching Henry how to use your bow?”  
  
Henry hid his face in his hands. Snow turned around to face Regina.  
  
“You told her?”  
  
“I told her, actually,” Emma said, her voice sounding angrier than she intended, causing Snow to focus her attention on her again.   
  
“Not that Regina shouldn’t have told me, if she knew it first. We are both his mothers,” she added more calmly. Regina smiled softly at that.  
  
“Who told you?”  
  
“I saw it myself. I was keeping an eye on you the other day. You know… while I was still the Dark One?”  
  
That last part caused something to snap inside Snow, her eyes softened. She walked to her daughter and hugged her.  
  
“Of course, honey,” she said in her still wet hair. Emma and Regina exchanged a confused look.  
  
After the initial super awkward moment, Snow had asked to spend some quality time with them. Unless they had other plans, of course. To which neither Emma nor Regina knew how to reply. So, they had ended up agreeing. As it turned out, Snow wanted to know more details of what had happened in Camelot. Emma had conceded a few more, but she hadn’t gone as deep as she had done with Regina. Henry had taken advantage of the situation to slip into his room.


	6. Chapter 6

Two painfully hours later, Snow was finally closing the door behind her, leaving them standing in the foyer. It was barely twelve minutes after twelve, and they both felt exhausted. At least mentally.  
  
Regina was still staring at the white door, when she felt Emma gently take her hand in hers. She intertwined their fingers together, and looked up at Emma’s determinate face. She let herself be guided.  
  
Without saying  a word, Emma guided her toward her study. Then inside it, not before locking the door behind them. Never letting go of her hand, she walked in front of one of the couches. She finally sat on it, pulling Regina down on her lap.   
  
Regina let go of her hand then, only to place it on her shoulder in order to turn around.  
  
“Hi,” said Emma, as soon as she had done positioning herself: she was now straddling her lap.  
  
“Hi,” Regina said back, placing her arms loosely around her neck.  
  
She leaned over and placed a soft kiss on her lips.  
  
“Jeez,” she exclaimed “I thought she’d never leave.”  
  
“Can we not talk about Snow right now?”  
Emma smirked, placing her hands on the small of her back, pushing her ever closer to herself. Regina got the hint: she leaned over for another kiss. A rougher one this time.  
  
They let their tongues explore each other’s mouths. Finally. And they took in the mixed taste their breakfast had left behind: blueberry, sugar, and mostly coffee. Emma kept taking Regina’s lower lip between her teeth, alternating between sucking on it, and running her tongue along it.  
  
The moment Regina had done the same, the moment she had bit lightly on Emma’s lower lip, Emma tightened her grip around her waist. She lifted herself slightly off the couch, only to lay Regina down on it. She was hovering on top of her in no time.  
  
“Someone is eager,” said Regina, looking up. She bit lightly on her now sore bottom lip, brining her hands to Emma’s toned arms at either side of her body.  
  
With her eyes almost completely darkened from lust, Emma leaned over to kiss her once more. Her blonde locks cascading down with the movement, mixing with Regina’s black ones already splayed on the couch cushion. So, they kept kissing. Switching from rough kisses to soft ones, to anything in between. Their hands roaming all over the other woman’s body.  
  
Coming up for air at one point, Emma looked down at Regina. Her hands were placed on her stomach, Regina’s were on her thighs, almost squeezing them.  
  
“God. You are so beautiful,” she whispered, looking into deep brown eyes.  
  
Regina smiled up at her. An almost blissful smile. Then she took Emma’s hands in hers, guiding them up and under her shirt. She placed them on her own breasts, and squeezed. Emma’s hands in a sandwich between Regina’s hands and Regina’s boobs.  
  
She leaned over once more, aiming for the neck. She nibbled and licked on it till Regina moaned her name in her ear. She stopped for a moment at that.  
  
“More.” It was the only other thing Regina whispered in her ear.  
  
Emma looked at her, a ‘are you sure?’ written all over her face. At Regina’s final nod, she straddled her hips, and tugged at her shirt.  
  
Regina lifted her back slightly off the couch in order to let the other take off her shirt. As Emma tossed it on the floor, she slipped her hand behind her back to unclasp her bra.  
  
Emma grinned widely at that. Then she removed it and tossed it along side the shirt. She stared down at Regina’s hard nipples. Without further prompting, Emma’s mouth was on one of them, her tongue rolling over it. As she moved to the other one, Regina’s hands moved to Emma’s tank top; she pulled at it. Emma reluctantly, but ever so willingly, let go of the nipple, and sat upright.  
  
Regina pulled her tank top up just as Emma was lifting her arms up. To her surprise, there was no bra underneath. She licked her lips at the sight. Then she brought Emma down for another desperate kiss. The feeling of skin against skin almost sent Regina over the edge. She had been fantasizing about this moment ever since that first night. The circumstances that brought them there had changed over the years, of course. It always ended up with Emma naked on top of her. Without letting go of Emma’s lips, Regina sneaked her hands between their bodies and started unbuttoning her jeans.  
Emma looked down at her hands. She was about to get off the couch to slide off her skinny jeans, when a thought crossed her mind. She lifted her hand up, making the item of clothing disappear off her, leaving only her red boxers on.  
  
“Is my magic getting any better?” she asked, half flirty - half nervous.  
  
Regina looked up and down her body, taking in the toned legs enclosing her hips. She brought her index finger to the boxer’s white waistband and traced it lightly.  
  
“Yes,” she replied. She wanted to say so much more, but her throat had gone dry. She cleared it.  
  
“Want me to do you too?”  
  
“Yes, Emma.” She chuckled now “I want you to do me too.”  
  
Emma raised her hand once more, making Regina’s pants and stocking disappear. She looked down at the black satin panties. She smiled; they were so much Regina.  
  
“What are you smiling at?” she asked, her fingertips gently stroking Emma’s sides.  
  
“I like your panties.” She leaned over and kissed her behind her ear.  
  
“Too bad they need to go.” Her voice was barely a whisper. Good thing Emma had been that close.  
  
“Tell them to take these boxers along with them.”  
  
Regina laughed this time. God, she had never laughed so much during sex. Hell, she had never been with anyone before that had made her laugh during sex, at all. She looked up at Emma’s face, which was scrutinizing her now. She squinted her eyes in order to find that last sign of consent. The moment she saw it into Emma’s unmoving eyes, she made both underwear disappear. If the mere touch of their bare breasts had drove her crazy; now the feeling of Emma’s wet center against her thighs made her feel like she had died and gone to heaven. She involuntarily moaned.  
  
“I haven’t done anything yet.”  
  
“Oh, you have done plenty already, Miss Swan,” she said in a playful tone.  
  
“Well, Madam Mayor…” she decided to play along “ready for what comes next?”  
  
Regina bit her lower lip and nodded. She had a few ideas on what was going to happen next. Neither one of those did. As usual, Emma surprised her: she got up, getting a hold of her legs, maneuvering her so she was sitting almost at the edge of the couch. She then kneeled in front of her on the carpet, pushing the coffee table against the other couch in the process.  
  
“God… you are so beautiful,” she told her again. And she suspected she would keep telling her again and again. She would never get tired of it.  
  
She placed both hands on her knees, looked up, and gently pulled them apart.  
  
Regina opened her legs as far as she could, thrusting her hips even closer to the edge of the couch.  
  
With her hands still on her knees, Emma dipped her head forward, kissing the inside of Regina’s left thigh. As she was almost at the apex, she retreated her head and started kissing the right thigh. Slowly… even slower than she had done before.  
  
“Emma!”  
  
She looked up at the need in her voice. She hooked her arms around her legs and positioned them on her own shoulders. Before Regina could beg her again, she started to slowly lick her outer lips. It wasn't where she needed her mouth the most; it sent shivers down her spine nonetheless.  
  
“Em-ma!” It started as a whispered and ended in a desperate plea. The way Regina said her name drove her mad with want. “No more teasing.”  
  
The begging… she never thought she’d have the pleasure of hearing Regina beg her. The pleasure… jeez. She was so wet herself already and neither of them had touched her yet.  
  
She decided to be merciful: she took Regina’s clit into her mouth, sucking on it lightly. Readily, Regina put her fingers through blonde locks. She arched her back, pushing her hips even more forward.  
  
With that simple gesture, Emma couldn’t wait any longer. She carefully placed one hand on Regina’s right thigh still on her shoulder, while the other went up to her entrance. Just as Regina looked down, she locked her eyes with hers, and pushed a finger inside. Regina was as wet as she felt, maybe even more so. She started moving it slowly inside. When she felt Regina’s hips move as forward as possible, she retreated her one finger. Before Regina could complain, she took her clit in her mouth again, and entered her with both her index and middle finger this time.  
Regina brought her head back and closed her eyes; her fingers once again interlocked into blonde hair. After a couple of minutes of Emma having found a steady rhythm between sucking her clit and curling her fingers inside her, Regina came undone. Her grip on Emma’s hair tightened, so did her walls around the two fingers. More wetness came rushing through her and into the other woman’s hand, while she cried out her name.  
  
Emma helped her ride out her orgasm, lapping as gently as possible on her clit. When she was sure she was done, she retreated her fingers one last time. She looked up at Regina’s gorgeous post-orgasm face: she still had her eyes closed. She lifted her legs off her shoulders, helping her into her previous sitting position, and laid her head on her lap. As she was bringing the still arousal-coated fingers to her mouth, she felt Regina’s hand around her wrist. She looked up just as Regina was bringing the fingers to her own mouth to lick them clean.  
  
“Are you trying to kill me?”“I haven’t done anything yet."“Oh, you have done plenty already, your Majesty.” She promptly used the same line she had used on her. The banter turning her own even more.  
  
Regina brought her hand to Emma’s cheek, a determined look in her eyes.  
  
“I want to take care of you now.”  
  
“Any ideas on how you are going to do that?” She challenged.  
  
Fire in her eyes, Regina motioned her to get up. She lay flat on the couch again. Before she could lay on top of her, a bright red dildo appeared between her legs, already strapped on.  
  
“I like how you think, Madam Mayor,” she said that as she was straddling her hips again. She placed the dildo between her folds, coating its entire length with her wetness. Without further ado, once it was fully covered with her arousal, she held it upright, slowly sinking down into it.  
  
Regina, who had been admiring the whole scene in awe, sprang into action by bringing her hands to Emma’s hips. As Emma started moving on the red dildo in an almost slow-motion pace, Regina started circling both her thumbs on the spot where she had placed them just under the hipbone.  
  
Soon enough, Emma was speeding up her pace, bringing a hand to her clit, and one to her left breast.  
  
“Hey.” Regina stopped the one going for her clit “My turn to do you.”  
  
Emma smirked down at her at that, and at Regina’s serious face, she threw her head back and laughed. Her long hair cascading down her back. The sight made Regina once again wonder if she had actually gone to heaven… Emma surely looked like an angel. A naughty one maybe, but still an angel.  
  
She promptly brought her thumb to the other woman’s clit, causing her to almost yelp on the spot.  
  
Emma looked down now, resuming her fast pace bouncing on the strap-on. Regina kept her thumb’s movement steady, thrusting up every time the other sank down, always meeting her halfway. That until Emma cried out in an explosive orgasm. Later on, she swore she could see fireworks behind her closed eyelids.  
  
As Emma came crushing down on her, laying her head on her chest, Regina made the strap-on disappear. She wrapped her arms around and exhausted Emma, holding her close.  
  
“Wow. I sure hope the kid didn’t hear us.”  
  
“I sound proofed the room when things started heating up.”  
  
“Good thinking.”  
  
Regina smiled, then started caressing Emma’s head as they lay there in silence. Not too long after, she asked if she was asleep.  
  
“Nope.”  
  
“I’m sorry.” That’s all she said.  
  
Emma lifted her head up and looked at her “About?”  
  
“For causing you so much pain,” her voice was unsure, Emma could sense it.  
  
“Trust me… you have done quite the contrary.” She decided to go with a joke to lighten up the mood.  
  
“Not right now.” Regina looked away.  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“Forcing your parents to send you here… forcing you to live without them.”  
  
“Hey,” said Emma, and waited for her to look in her direction.   
  
“I thought we had already moved on from this… a long time ago,” she continued.  
  
“Well, yes, we did. But… I wanted things to be all good between us before we moved our relationship into this new direction.”  
  
“I understand.” Emma leaned her head on her chest again, closing her eyes deep in thought.  
  
“I wouldn’t change a single thing,” she whispered minutes later “it made me who I am today.”  
  
“Not even giving up Henry?” Regina asked; there was not a single ounce of resentment or judgement in her voice.  
  
“It breaks my heart every time I think of the first ten years of his life I have missed. Even though your memories of raising him you gave me helped easing it up.”  
  
“But no… I wouldn’t have been able to take proper care of him. Henry is who he is mostly because of you, Regina.” she smiled softly saying that. Looking at her again, she brought her hand up to brush a tear off Regina’s face.  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
“It’s all water under the bridge. Okay?”  
  
“Okay.”

 

* * *

  
  
  
The next day, Emma was laying down on the study’s couch again. It had quickly become her favorite spot at the mansion. The night before, after having spent most of it with both Henry and Regina, she had gone back to the new house. The new empty house. She wasn’t really sure why she had done it. Maybe because that’s what she had told her mother she’d wanted to do. One thing was sure: she had tossed and turned all night long, and part of the early morning. Before eight, she had given up on sleep altogether, getting out of the house shortly after. Then, she had passed by Granny’s to grab some breakfast to bring at the mansion. Later in the morning, though, the sleepless night had caught up with her through a huge headache. Hence, the laying on the couch. She was laying on her back, with an arm propped on under her head, the other on her stomach. She brought her mind back to a train of thoughts she had started back in Camelot…

 

*********************************************************

  
  
She had been laying in the same exact position on the green grass. She had started wondering why on earth she had started dating Hook. Hell, she had even asked him out on their first date herself. Then she had realized the reason why. And it had been when the Rumple in her head felt no more than a quirky side kick; so she had been able to think freely. Or so she had assumed.  
  
She had started dating him because she thought it would have made her parents happy, for once. They were Snow White and Prince Charming, for crying out loud, they surely wanted their only daughter to marry a guy. Even her trip to the past to her had been a sign pointing to that: the ballroom had been full of hetero couples. Only hetero couples, so a guy had to be. Hook had been the one that had insisted enough till the moment she had given in. She had also used him as a kind of challenge… she had come close to telling them, ‘you are so desperate to see me end up with a dude, that a filthy pirate will do for you;’ not knowing that her parents barely put up with him because they thought she was happy.  
The thing was, she had known she was attracted to women when she had first set foot into town. She had even blurted it out to Ruby one night at The Rabbit Hole. Ruby had kept talking about how cute August was, and how he totally wanted to get into Emma’s pants. That’s when she had blurted it out…  
  
“That sounds romantic,” she had said, after taking a sip of her beer “Plus, I like women, so…”  
  
“I like women, too,” Ruby had said, looking down at the almost empty glass of gin and tonic “I like men… I like people.”  
  
“I only like women.”  
  
“Cheers.” Ruby had clinked her glass against her bottle, and had gulped down the rest of its content. And that had been it.  
  
She hadn’t really told anyone else in town, it had never really come up during the time spent before the curse had been broken. Then, as she had discovered that everything Henry had been telling her was true, that her parents were characters out of a Disney movie, she had started assuming. Assuming she was supposed to act a certain way, and be attracted only to a certain kind of people.  
  
Laying on the grass, she had been smiling to herself at the memory of Ruby at the bar, when she felt a cold chill. Something was blocking the sun. She opened her eyes: it was a someone.  
  
“Love? You okay?” he asked.  
  
“Have you been avoiding me?” he had asked, before she could finish propping herself on her elbows, or answer his previous question.  
  
“No.” Her voice was dry.  
  
“Because, as I recall, you have asked me out on a date. and now…”  
  
‘Yeah, sure,’ she thought to herself ‘let’s leave out the multiple times before where you basically harassed me into doing so.’  
  
“Now…” he was still talking “you haven’t even showed a little gratitude for having found you here, and having brought your family to you.”  
  
Even before Regina had confirmed it to her, she knew none of it had been Hook’s doing. She grunted, getting on her feet.  
  
“What kind of gratitude?”  
  
“The same one you showed me when I saved your father’s life in Neverland.” He pursed his lips and placed a finger on them.  
  
She shivered at the memory: that had been their first and last kiss. She knew Hook considered her giving him mouth to mouth when Zelena had tried to drown him as their second kiss. She was merely saving his life. Maybe she should have left him die that day. She knew it was her darkness talking. She had to give it to him, though: not even he considered the kiss he gave her in New York to try and bring her memory back as a real kiss. She wasn’t sure if it had been the knee in the groin, or the being arrested for sexual harassment part, but the bottom line was that he hadn’t mentioned it again.  
  
“Look, Killian,” she had started, knowing that using his first name would have made him easier to talk to, but was interrupted by Henry running toward them.

 

*********************************************************  
  
  


Now, on the couch, she was going over it again. She was angry at herself for having given in. Both to Hook, at to what she thought were her parents’ expectations.  
  
  
There was a light knock on the open door.  
  
“Emma?” Regina called for her as she got closer “How is your head doing?”  
  
“Better,” she replied distractedly, still a bit lost in her thoughts.  
  
“What were you thinking about?” she asked when she saw her serious face.  
  
“Hook.”  
  
“Ha!” Regina put her hands on her hips “My least favorite subject.”  
  
“I was just wondering how I ever dated him. If what we had could be considered dating.”  
  
“And?”  
  
“I wasn’t thinking straight… or maybe I was thinking too straight.” She winked.  
  
Regina relaxed her arms at her side, and laughed.  
  
“Before I forget,” she said moments later “Henry wants to talk to us.”  
  
“The both of us?”  
  
Regina nodded, and Emma got on her feet.  
  
“What about?”  
  
“Your guess is as good as mine.”  
  
They were walking out of the study.  
  
“Puppies?”  
  
“Okay then.” Regina stopped in her tracks, looked at her, and said: “your guess is probably not as good as mine.” She then started walking again, toward the living room.  
  
Emma stuck her tongue out at her back, then followed her.  
  
  
Henry was waiting for them, sitting at a chair he had placed in front of the couch.  
  
“Kid. What’s up?”  
  
He gestured for them to sit on the couch. He looked like he was about to close a business deal. And so they sat.  
  
“I want… I would like to ask you something.”  
  
“Okay,” Regina said carefully.  
  
“What does it feel like to share a romantic True Love kiss?” he blurted out in one breath “I have asked grandma and grandpa, and both of them told me I should wait and see for myself.”  
  
“Hate to say it, but I agree with the two idiots,” Regina said just as Emma was asking him: “Do you know how your very first kiss feels?”  
  
“Of course he doesn’t,” Regina said looking at Emma; then she turned around and looked at him “well, do you?”  
  
He nodded. “My very first kiss was with Paige when I was ten. But it wasn’t as good as kissing that one lost boy later on: his lips were softer, and she kissed me more roughly than he did. Well, Paige kissed me out of the blue that one time. I started it with the lost boy.”  
  
“What lost boy? Is he one of those that came to Storybrooke?” Regina raised an eyebrow. Emma seemed amused.  
  
“I don’t recall,” Henry said sheepishly “I was just trying to get some info out of him. And he was cute.”  
  
“He takes that from you,” Regina exclaimed, looking from one to another.  
  
“I don’t go around kissing random guys,” Emma protested.  
  
Regina raised an eyebrow at her this time. Damn it, that kiss to Hook was going to hunt her forever.  
  
“So,” Henry said, bringing his moms’ attention back to himself “you haven’t answered me: how does it feel like?”  
  
Before either of them could open their mouths to reply, and after a white blinding light enveloped the room, there wasn’t a single trace of them on the couch.  
  
“Moms?” Henry whispered confused. He got up, calling for them louder.  
  
“Mom?” he said as if talking only to Regina now, walking from one room to the other “I promise I won’t ask again until I am eighteen. Or even thirty. Just come back, this isn’t funny.” His voice echoed back at him in the now empty house.


	7. Chapter 7

The feeling of poofing, or being poofed by someone else as that was the case, had become familiar to her. As familiar as falling asleep. This time, tough, the feeling had been amplified ten times over. It left her feeling like she had the word ‘kid,’ as that was how she was about to start answering her son, stuck in her throat. She started coughing before she even opened her eyes. She hadn’t meant literally stuck.  
  
“You okay over there?”  
  
She felt dizzy as she finally allowed herself to open her eyes and take in her surroundings.  
  
“I would feel better if my feet were on the ground,” she pointed  out, struggling to find a good position in the net hanging up from the tree she had found herself in.  
  
“Shit,” she added, looking down at the woman standing a few feet away from the trap, sword pointing at her direction. There was something familiar in the pathway just outside the woods she could see from her higher perspective.  
  
“Dorothy?” she tried.  
  
“How do you know my name?” she raised her sword even higher.  
  
“The yellow brick-road,” Emma said as a matter of fact “your outfit, too, now that I think of it.”  
  
“And who are you?”  
  
“My name is Emma Swan!” She wasn’t sure why she had given away her full name so easily.  
  
“Do you work for the Wicked Witch of The West?”  
  
“The Wic- who? Zelena?”  
  
“How do you know her?” Dorothy’s voice gave away her nervousness at the mention of the name, even though her hand remained steady.  
  
“She tried to kill me. And my whole family,” she told her “she is the one who ended up dead. She has been dead for a while now.”  
  
“How do I know this is not a trap?”  
  
Emma raised her eyebrow, looking at the net she was still in.  
  
“You know what I mean,” Dorothy almost barked at her.  
  
“Look,” Emma started, raising her hands up, as to further show her she didn’t mean any harm “I’d show you the tape, but…”  
  
“Tape? Where are you from?”  
  
“Storybrooke, Maine. Well, I’m not from Storybrooke, but I do live there now.”  
  
“I have been told Zelena was still alive in this place called Storybrooke.”  
  
“Who told you?” Emma wondered if she was the one in a trap, and not just a physical one.  
  
“My… uhm…” Dorothy cleared her throat “Ruby.”  
  
“Ruby? You know Ruby?” Emma asked almost relieved “She left to find her pack before we discovered Zelena had been killed in her cell. She, Ruby I mean, told my mom she was going to find her pack. My mom is Snow White.”  
  
Emma instinctively closed her eyes as Dorothy raised her sword. Two seconds later, she was on the floor. She looked up, and took the hand Dorothy was offering her to get up. She had used the sword to cut the rope.  
  
“Thank you,” she said with a smile “so I get you didn’t bring me here?”  
  
“No, you just triggered one of my traps. You must have magic.”  
  
“I do,” she replied, then looked down at her feet “so, I can’t blame you for me being poofed away with no shoes on!?”  When Regina had told her Henry needed to talk to them, she had padded with just her socks on from one room to the other. She raised her hand up, flicking it just as Regina had taught her, and her own old pair of sneakers appeared on her feet.  
  
“I’m afraid not,” Dorothy said almost apologetically, positioning her sword back in its place on her waist “let’s go.”  
  
“How do you know Ruby anyway?” Emma asked, following her through the woods.  
  
“She is my girlfriend. I need to find her.”  
  
“I feel like I should find mine, too,” Emma blurted out “my girlfriend, I mean. At least I think she is. We had sex, and shared a True Love kiss. Not in that order…”  
  
“And of course, our son. I should probably find our son, too. Jeez, why am I telling you all of this?”  
  
Dorothy stopped in her tracks to look at Emma.  
  
“That one is my fault, I’m afraid. My traps are enchanted so whoever is in it can not lie.”  
  
“Like Wonder Woman’s lasso,” Emma exclaimed.  
  
“Kinda,” Dorothy conceded “it should wear off in about ten minutes.”  
  
“Great.”  
  
“Shall we just walk for now?” she asked, tilting her chin toward the pathway in front of them.  
  
Emma nodded, and followed her close behind. She was hoping really badly that her own lie detector super power was right, and she could indeed trust Dorothy. She needed to find Regina and Henry as soon as possible.  
  
“You got a kid, uh?” Dorothy asked when she was sure the truth enchantment had worn off. They had walked in complete silence along the yellow pathway for about fifteen minutes. Emma looking around every so often in search of her people.  
  
Inspecting their surroundings, before deciding there was nothing and no one there for her, she nodded.  
  
“I don’t mean to pry, but… how is that you don’t even know if the woman you are looking for is your girlfriend, but you two share a son?”  
  
“Well…” Emma brought her hand to the back of her neck “I gave birth to him, she is the one who raised him for the first ten years of his life. I only recently got back into his life. It’s… complicated.”  
  
She had used that word often to describe her relationship with Regina over the years. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was simpler than she thought: a birth parent and an adoptive one falling in love with each other. There were probably half a dozen movies based on that premises, at least.  
  
“Is your son named Henry?”  
  
Emma abruptly stopped and turned around to face her. “How do you know? she asked cautious.  
  
“I knew it,” exclaimed Dorothy. At Emma’s increasing worry written all over her face, she explained.  
  
“The story seemed familiar. Ruby told me about a kid named Henry dragging his birth mother to your town in order to break the Dark Curse.”  
  
Emma heaved a sigh of relief, relaxing her shoulders. No matter how nice Dorothy seemed, she didn’t like random strangers knowing her son’s name. She nodded again: her super powers told her she was telling the truth.  
  
“So, you are the Savior?”  
  
“Yeap, that would be me,” Emma placed both her thumbs inside her jeans’ back pockets, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She still wasn’t fully used to the title.  
  
They simultaneously started walking again.  
  
“Ruby mentioned sensing some vibe between you and the other mother. She said you two were pretty much oblivious to it.”  
  
Before she even formulated a reply in her head, something into the woods at her right caught her attention: Regina tied up to one of the trees. She ran toward her, causing Dorothy to pick up the pace and run after her.  
  
“Emma,” Regina yelled, struggling with the now green glowing rope keeping her in place.  
  
What followed happened very fast, but at the same time Emma felt she was witnessing and living it in slow motion. She was almost close enough to free Regina, when Dorothy jumped between them. Her sword raised up, ready to struck Regina. Emma moved forward, tackling her to the ground. She was about to ask her what the hell had gotten into her, when she heard a curious sound coming from above them. She looked up: cracks were forming where Regina’s heart was. Then with a loud clunk pieces of glass came crashing down, becoming dust as they hit the grass. Regina had disappeared.  
  
Emma looked at Dorothy still laying on the ground under her, her eyes wide in question.  
  
“One of Zelena’s old traps.”  
  
As Dorothy explained her, after she had apologized and helped her get on her feet, she had broken the mirror just in time. If Emma had touched it, she would have been trapped in it; forever trying to free Regina from that rope. The spell was so strong on the first person that sat eyes on it that they didn’t even see its edges. She then reassured Emma that no, Regina wasn’t really stuck in it. The mirror fed off people’s worries. After that, they kept talking in silence on the yellow brick-road.   
  


 

* * *

  
  
  
Meanwhile, Regina was walking aimlessly in what looked like unfamiliar land. She had both tried poofing herself where Henry and/or Emma where, and tried to summon something belonging to the two in order to track them down. Neither gave any result. There was something preventing her to do those things, and it wasn’t lack of magic. A bush set aflame a few yards back could attest to that fact. That’s why she had decided to channel Emma, she was so damn good at tracking people down, even without the aid of magic. She also tried to listen to her beating heart, it somehow always knew where to guide her lately. She had closed her eyes for a few minutes, then had started walking in one direction.   
  
Now, she still felt like she wasn’t on the right path. She was surely walking somewhere someone didn’t want anyone to walk through; she had barely avoided a few traps along the way. She was grateful her magic wasn’t completely gone. Not so grateful for the fact that she didn’t know why she had appeared there; who had made her do so; or most importantly, why Emma and Henry weren’t with her. The conversation they were having hadn’t been the easiest, sure. Learning about her little prince having already kissed two people, that she knew of, was definitely hard to swallow. She still would have preferred to be talking about that, instead of being alone in the middle of this strange land. Whatever the hell it was.  
  
The walk that far, besides the occasional trap here and there, had been very quiet. Maybe too quiet. She didn’t even finish that thought, that she heard noises coming from a bush behind her. She turned around quickly, fireball ready in her hand, and waited for whoever or whatever was there to come out. A second later, a tiny dog appeared, leaves stuck all over its fur.  
  
She smiled at the small creature, the flame disappearing from her palm. She was kneeling down to say hi to the dog, animals had always been a soft spot for her, when more noise came from behind the bushes. She instinctively threw a fireball in its direction. This time she could clearly hear human footsteps.  
  
“Hey,” the someone said “be careful. You almost hit me.”  
  
She looked up and found herself staring up at a familiar face.  
  
“Ruby!?”  
  
“Your ma- Madam M-” Ruby was a babbling mess not knowing how to address her.  
  
“Regina is fine.”  
  
“Re- Regina.” It felt weird in her mouth “What are you doing here?”  
  
“Where is here anyway?”  
  
“Oz.”  
  
“This must be Toto, then,” said Regina with a smile “I thought he looked familiar.”  
  
As Ruby nodded, confirming it was him, she pat him on the head a few times, then stood up.  
  
“Oh,” she said, realizing Ruby was still waiting for an answer “I don’t know why I am here.”  
  
Ruby still looked at her as though she was expecting the royal guards to jump from behind the trees at any moment, ready to lock her up somewhere in her castle. Even if they were in a different realm.  
  
“Just yesterday I was talking about you with your Grandma.”  
  
“Since when you and Granny talk?” There was still skepticism in her voice “And about me of all things.”  
  
By the look on her face, and the way Granny had talked about her granddaughter, Regina realized they hadn’t been able to keep in touch. She decided to explain everything that had happened since she had left Storybrooke. She tried to be as detailed as possible; ending with being on her couch one moment, and finding herself in the middle of another realm the other. She made sure to put emphasis on the conversation had at Granny’s just the morning before.  
  
Ruby had followed everything attentively, not moving an inch as she did so. She seemed to believe what Regina was telling her. There were a few things that made her believe it wasn’t an elaborated story she had made up on the spot. One, was the way she had described her conversation with Granny. Two, the way she had talked about  Emma and their blooming romance; or really, the way she talked about Snow and co. in general. Three, the fact that besides the fireball thrown at her direction by mistake, she hadn’t really tried, or seemed to want to, hurt her, with or without magic. Finally, Toto had run around her the whole time she had been talking, sniffing her clothes and wagging his tail. The little ball of fur was a good judge of character. And so it seemed that the Evil Queen was not so evil anymore.  
  
“You have no idea how you got here, then?” she asked at last.  
  
“No,” Regina still felt dizzy thinking about the way she had been poofed away like that, without her consent.  
  
“And you don’t know if either Emma or Henry were poofed away as well?”  
  
Regina shook her head, hands deep in her pantsuit’s pockets.  
  
“Have you tried tracking them down?”  
  
“I can’t seem to be able to use my magic properly in this realm.” She told her about the items belonging to them she had tried to summon.  
  
“Do you mind if I…” started Ruby, already sniffing the air around them more intensely.  
  
Regina made a gesture with her hand as to say ‘be my guest.’ And then they started walking through Oz, Ruby a few steps ahead, Regina with Toto strolling at her side.  
  
“Anyway,” said Ruby at one point “I have found someone.”  
  
“Oh?” Regina, who had picked up her pace, looked at her puzzled.  
  
“I mean… you can tell Granny I have found someone and I am happy.”  
  
“I will… as soon as, you know…”  
  
“I know,” replied Ruby, tightening her red cloak around her shoulders.  
  
“Will you ever get back to Storybrooke?” Regina wasn’t sure why she had asked. The words had come out of her mouth before she could think them over.  
  
“Eventually, yes.”  
  
Walking along side Ruby hadn’t been as awkward as she had imagined when she first offered to help her find Emma and Henry. She had a lot of questions, though, which she didn’t mind; they were a way of keeping her mind away from awful thoughts. The questions were on what was Snow up to, how big baby Neal had gotten since she had last seen him, and general questions about everyone living in Storybrooke. She did make sure everything was alright with Granny, without asking too many specific questions, knowing that besides the talk they’d had the day before Regina didn’t really have much of an insight into her Grandma’s life.  
  
There also were a few silences during their walk, even Toto had stopped yapping. During one of them, Ruby suddenly stiffen her back, her nostrils wide.  
  
“Duck,” she yelled.  
  
Regina followed her order immediately, instinctively bringing the dog closer to her. She then looked around in the hope of spotting where the danger was coming from.   
  
Ruby walked a few step ahead and to the right. When she understood she couldn’t really tell which side the attack was going to come from, she tried to follow her own advice. Before she completely ducked, a flying monkey pierced through her shoulder, leaving her falling on the ground. The winged monster was already gone before Regina could throw a fireball in its direction.  
  
Seeing that using her magic on the attacker was futile, Regina made sure the coast was actually clear, then she started to make her way toward the other woman.  
  
“Stand back,” Ruby growled, turning around, her eyes a yellow hue.  
  
“I should take a look at your wound,” she said, her voice shaky, her palms turned up as in showing she meant no harm.  
  
Ruby shook her head. She turned around and showed her the tear into her cloak.   
  
Realization of what that meant hit Regina just as Ruby was turning into a wolf. She instinctively took a step back, not knowing how the big werewolf in front of her acted when she was in wolf form. To her surprise, Toto was getting nearer, curiously sniffing the air separating them.  
  
“Toto…” Regina whispered.  
  
Ruby showed her now big sharp teeth, then turned around and started running in the other direction. Although she had turned, the laceration on her shoulder blade was still there. And it was bleeding profusely.   
  
“Shit,” she exclaimed. She didn’t ask for any of that crap to happen. Of course, as usual, she didn’t have time to hang around and complain. She had to act, and fast. She located some of the blood left by Ruby on the grass, and kneeled beside it. Moments later, it was floating in front of her and sprinting in the same direction the wolf had just ran to.  
  
She tried to keep up with the enchanted blood as best as possible. She also needed to keep an eye on the dog, and make sure there were no more flying monkeys in sight.   
  
After a while, she stopped at a clearing. Her legs ached and she was panting. Her eyes were still glued on the moving blood, when she noticed it had slowed down considerably. She took a final deep breath, and kept going. The slowing down only meant Ruby had stopped not too far ahead, and she needed to check on her as soon as possible.  
  
She spotted the wounded wolf right at the end of the clearing. She was about to get close enough to check on her, when someone ordered her to stop.  
  
“I wouldn’t move another step closer, if I were you,” the same voice said. A tall woman appeared from behind the bushes, sword at the ready. Toto immediately bypassed the huge animal, and went to her.  
  
Regina wanted to argue that she wanted only to help, but she had a feeling she had to wait a couple of minutes longer. The sword pointed in her direction didn’t help either. So, she stood still and watched.  
  
Dorothy put her hand in her bag across her chest, taking out a red cloak similar to the one Ruby was wearing not too long before. She carefully placed it on top of the wolf, and seconds later Ruby was back in human form. Dorothy kneeled down and cupped her face in her hands.  
  
“Ruby?” Her thumb circled on her cheek “Ruby?”  
  
“What did you do to her?” she took her sword from the ground and pointed it at Regina again. Even though she recognized her as the woman in the mirror Emma had tried to help, she wasn’t sure she could trust her. Not with her Ruby wounded like that.  
  
“It’s okay,” whispered Ruby, barely able to keep her eyes open “it wasn’t her.”  
  
“She needs help,” Regina finally managed to say.  
  
“We can’t move her.”  
  
“I have magic.”  
  
“You can heal her?”  
  
Regina nodded.  
  
Dorothy placed a kiss on Ruby’s forehead. She then stood up, motioning Regina to do what she had to do.  
  
As Regina kneeled down next to Ruby, she knew she had Dorothy’s sword pointed at her. She didn’t blame her, she would have been just as protective if it had been someone she cared about. She quickly healed the wound.  
  
“Thank you,” said Ruby, breathing deeply. Her eyes still closed.  
  
“You are the Savior’s girlfriend?” asked Dorothy as Regina was standing up, her sword back in its place.  
  
She was about to argue that she didn’t really know what they were just yet, when a thought occurred to her. “Who told you about that?” she asked.  
  
“Emma herself.”  
  
“Where is she now?”  
  
“She was with me till not too long ago, then I turned around one second and she was gone.”  
  
Heart racing in her chest, Regina placed a hand on her stomach.  
  
“The flying monkey,” said Ruby, from her still laying position, snapping her eyes open.  
  
Ruby and Dorothy nodded at each other in silent understanding. Ruby got on her feet fast.  
  
“I know where she is,” she said to a clearly worried Regina.  
  
Regina bit her lower lip and nodded, she had no other option than to trust Ruby’s instinct at the moment. Not that she didn’t trust her, she simply didn’t know what the hell was going on. She had no idea where Emma had gone either. And she had no clue on whether Henry had been poofed to Oz as well or not. She asked Dorothy, which she told her that when she had found her, Emma was on her own; there had been no sign of their son, but his other mother had been looking for him as well.   
  
She once again let Ruby guide her through the woods. The lack of control she had on the situation unnerved her. She had, of course, tried to use her magic to track her family down one way or another. It didn’t go very well. So, she walked a few steps behind the couple, who were talking to each other in low voices. She assumed they were catching up on the events so far.   
  
With the initial excitement about having found his owner, Toto had barked incessantly at Dorothy until she had picked him up and walked with him in her arms. Then, five minutes or so later he had broke free and had started walking besides Regina. That’s where he still was now.  
  
When they finally stepped in front of their destination, what seemed to be the Emerald Castle, Ruby turned around and tilted her head. She then tilted her chin toward the building confirming that’s where they were headed.  
  
“I should get in first,” Regina said firmly.  
  
Ruby didn’t try to argue at all, she simply stepped aside. When Regina was ahead of them, though, she added: “We are right behind you.”  
  
Regina nodded, then walked ahead. Her back stiff and her hands curled up in fists at either side of her body. The first room she walked into seemed to be empty. She called out for Emma.  
  
“Regina?” her voice came from behind the curtain in front of her at the far end of the room. Only then she noticed Emma’s shadow on it.  
  
A loud flapping of wings on her right caught her attention: she looked as the flying monkey planted its feet on the floor and turned into a man. A man with a stupid grin on his face.  
  
“I finally meet the famous Regina,” he said “in the year spent in New York, I had to hear all about you. It was obnoxious.”  
  
“I had to trick this one,” he continued pointing at the curtain “into drinking a forgetting potion every time she told me about her dreams of a woman named Regina. A woman Henry called ‘mom.’ ”  
  
Regina walked toward him, fire in her eyes. The man was ready for one of The Evil Queen’s famous fireballs to hit him. But what she did caught him completely off guard: the moment she was close enough, she punched him right in the jaw. It was so unexpected that it sent him tumbling backward and on his ass. He brought a hand to the now aching jaw.  
  
“Regina? What happened?” Emma asked not knowing who had fallen down.  
  
“I have wanted to do this ever since Henry told me you had proposed to Emma,” said Regina, looking at Walsh, simultaneously reassuring Emma by letting hear her voice “even more so when I learned you were one of my sister’s flying monkeys. Why are you still working for her?”  
  
“What do you mean ‘still’?”  
  
“She is dead.”  
  
“And I should take the Evil Queen’s word as true?” he tried to get on his feet to attack her, but she was quicker: with a flick of her hand, she brought his hands behind his back and tied them up together with a rope. He fell face down at the sudden unbalance.  
  
“Regina??” Emma exclaimed suddenly “something is happening here.”  
  
Quick footsteps approached her from behind, and Ruby assured her that they had this, she could go to Emma.  
  
“You really think you are going to be able to free her?” Walsh hissed from behind her. With a flick of her hand, she silenced him.  
  
Being careful not to touch anything, Regina almost ran toward the curtain, setting it aside with her magic when she was close enough. She found Emma in a similar position to the one she had just left Walsh in: flat on the floor, her hands tied up behind her back. The difference was that this rope was glowing green. She tried to magic it away, only to cause it to tighten around Emma’s wrists.  
  
Emma wanted to scream then, swear at the sudden constriction, but found herself unable to utter a single word. She looked up at Regina; her eyes wide, and her mouth still half open.   
  
“Does it hurt?” she asked, kneeling down next to her.  
  
Emma tried to hold back a grimace with no success, sweat started running down her forehead. The rope was starting to burn into her skin.  
  
Regina cupped her face into her hands, looked her in the eye, and promised it was going to be okay. She then placed her lips on Emma’s, the intention was to kiss her as a way to distract her from the pain and try to think of a solution to the unbreakable rope. But the moment their lips touched, the rainbow magic enveloped the whole room. They both blinked at the sudden light; the next moment, they were both standing in the middle of the mansion’s living room.


	8. Chapter 8

“What the hell?” exclaimed Emma, thinking it had all been some kind of screwed up simulation of some sort. A dream, perhaps. Her wrist told a different story: she looked down at them, a thin red line around both. “Ouch,” she exclaimed next.  
  
Regina, still slightly dizzy from the recent events but otherwise all in one piece, gently took Emma’s hands in hers. She guided them up, before healing the burns. She then raised the left one, the one with the small tattoo, to her lips and kissed it.  
  
“Henry,” they both said at the same, looking around. They were just stepping outside the room, when he came toward them. He had a pan raised above his head, ready to fight the intruder.  
  
“Moms?” he said with a puzzled face, letting go of the pan before he ran to hug them both.  
  
He hugged Regina first, as tight as possible. He then hugged Emma, lingering into the embrace a few seconds longer; the recent separation still having a toll on him.  
  
“Ma? Can you stay here for the night?” he asked, sounding like his 10 year old self.  
  
Emma looked at Regina from above his head. At the small nod from the other woman, she agreed that yes, she could spent the night at the mansion.  
  
He smiled widely, before he started asking all kind of questions. Why had they disappeared all of a sudden? Where had they gone to? What had happened to them?  
  
Each of them recounted their side of the story. To Emma’s surprise, both Henry and Regina made the Wonder Woman comment at the mention of Dorothy’s net’s powers. Henry got excited at the mention of the dog.  
  
“Do you think they’ll be okay with Walsh and everything?” Henry asked in a serious voice at the end of the story.  
  
“I’m sure,” said Regina “Ruby and Dorothy had it all under control.”  
  
“Sorry we scared you, sweetheart,” she added immediately.  
  
“You didn’t,” he said almost defensively “well, okay… the first thing I did after I realized you weren’t in the house anymore, was locking myself in your study and calling grandma.”  
  
“Grandma Belle,” he added at Regina’s raised eyebrow “she told me a few books I should check in there, while she looked something up at the library.”  
  
Regina’s face suddenly got very serious. She turned around and started walking toward the study.  
  
“I didn’t touch any of your potions this time. I promise,” said Henry on her tail. Emma walking besides him.  
  
Without turning around, Regina marched in front of her bookcase, and took a few books out. She carefully placed them on a lower shelf, then took a vial behind a hidden compartment at the far back of the shelf.  
  
“Here,” she said, handing it to Henry. At his puzzled expression, she added: “it is a spell protection. Blood magic. My blood, and yours. That means only you and I would be able to have access to you, if you use it. And well… the whole idiotic clan.”  
  
“Hey,” Emma protested.  
  
Regina looked at her as to say ‘get over it’, then she looked at their son again.  
  
“Gold too, I suppose,” she added “anyway, if something like this happens again… place one drop on the doorknob and you are safe. Make sure to cover all other entrances, like windows, as well.”  
  
Henry nodded, his face serious. He secretly wished he didn’t have to use it.  
  
The doorbell ringing out of the blue startled the three of them. They were clearly still shook up by the recent events; so, they all moved together toward the foyer to see who it was.  
  
“I came as soon as I could,” said Belle at the door opening, then she realized Regina was on the other side “oh, hey, you are here!”  
  
“Yes,” she held the door more open and gestured inside “come in and I’ll explain.”  
  
Belle nodded, then walked inside, arms wrapped around a few books.  
  
“I didn’t find much for now. There wasn’t really much to go on with.”  
  
“It was so unexpected for all of us,” Regina said while closing the front door.  
  
“I bet,” Belle replied. She looked up and noticed the other two people in the foyer. She balanced her books in one arm, and placed a hand on Emma’s shoulder.  
  
“Welcome back.”  
  
Emma tilted her head, puzzled at being the only one being welcomed back, then she realized. They hadn’t seen each other since she had been the Dark One.  
  
“Thanks, Belle.” She smiled softly.  
  
Regina guided them all to the kitchen, where they all sat down for a cup of coffee. Hot cocoa for Henry. They recounted everything that had happened since they got poofed away earlier in the evening, trying not to leave any useful detail behind.  
  
Thirty minutes later, Regina was walking Belle to the front door.  
  
“I will get to it as soon as possible. Then, I’ll see you on Monday?”  
  
“Thank you, Belle.” Regina smiled “And yes, Monday sounds good.”  
  
Belle was almost out of the door, when Regina realized she hadn’t asked about Rumple at all. So she did.  
  
“He is doing better. He wanted to come and help, but I insisted he should rest a bit longer. He hasn’t been awake two full days.”  
  
“Stubborn as ever, I see.”  
  
“Yes.” Belle rolled her eyes slightly for a moment, then they filled with love again “Oh, by the way… I think he wants to have some kind of dinner with ‘the family.’ He put it that way.”  
  
“Really?”  
  
“Yes. He is really taking this new clean slate seriously.”  
  
Regina tried not to frown, she still wasn’t used to her ex-teacher being anything but a dark manipulator. She was willing to believe in his change, though; after all, she was living proof that you can change your ways, if only you found the right incentive. And the right kind of people supporting you in the hard process.  
  
“Then we’ll have to make it happen,” she said at last.  
  
The moment she closed the door, she leaned with her back against it. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Things had been more exhausting than she had thought they’d be. Usually, after breaking a curse, they would have that little bit of breathe time before the next thing hit them. This time, though, the things kept on coming. She hoped that what had happened earlier was the last of it. Bringing her hands at either side of her body, she felt the coolness of the door against her palms, and stayed there, not moving an inch, for a couple of minutes longer. She then took another deep breath, opened her eyes, and started walking toward the kitchen.  
  
“You okay?” asked Emma, before she was out of the foyer, causing her to look up.  
  
“Yeah, I’m -” she started, but let it trail off. There was no reason for her to lie in that moment. Being brought to Oz out of the blue, and everything that had happened there was still too fresh in their minds not to have it bother her. She was still thinking about Emma tied down in the Emerald Castle. And the nauseous feeling in the pit of her stomach of not knowing where Henry was.  
  
Emma, sensing that, got closer and enveloped her in a hug. She let herself be hugged, comforted by the feeling of Emma’s strong arms around her, and she hugged her back. It was a relief being able to hug each other after they had been in danger. There had been numerous times in the past when they wanted to do so, just hold the other tight to show them they were glad they were both alive, but neither of the two knew how to initiate it. So, they had never really done so. This hug, now, lasted a bit longer than usual because of that.  
  
“The kid wants to watch a movie before he has to go to bed,” Emma said as they let go. Henry had proposed the idea to her in the kitchen, before she had said she’d go check on his other mother.  
  
“Fine,” she smiled up at her “as long as there are no witches.”  
  
“I think we can manage,” Emma replied with a chuckle. Then they walked side by side to the kitchen and joined their son.   
  
  


* * *

 

  
  
“Hey, kid,” said Emma the next morning, walking inside the kitchen. She was wearing a mismatched pjs, consisting of a plain short-sleeved white shirt and flannel pants. Her hair was sticking in all directions; bed hair in the non-cool kind of way.  
  
Henry looked up at her, grunted, then looked down again before taking a sip of water from the glass in front of him. That’s all he had woken up and walked downstairs for. There were ten bottles in his room, and not a single drop of water in them.  
  
“Still no school?”  
  
“Still no work?” he mumbled back.  
  
“Touché.”  
  
“I am serious,” she added, seeing he wasn’t giving her an answer.  
  
“It’s Sunday.”  
  
“Oh.” Emma lightly scratched the back of her head “That makes sense. And I’m going back to work the day after tomorrow, I think.”  
  
He shrugged at her, he didn’t really know why she was so chatty all of a sudden. Maybe she felt awkward because she had slept upstairs with his other mom. Grown ups… they are weird.  
  
“Tomorrow I guess I’m going to pick the boxes up from the loft, you know? To bring them to my new house, since I agreed with Snow that I would do that on Monday. I didn’t realized it was tomorrow,” she concluded.  
  
That got his attention: he looked up, more awake now.  
  
“Why don’t you just move in here?”  
  
“Henry… it’s - I can’t just - it’s…”  
  
“… complicated,” said both of them at the same time.  
  
“Well, it is. I don’t think I should.”  
  
“Who cares about that. Do you want to?” He always managed to look so grown up in situations like this.  
  
“I - I don’t know, kid, okay?” she said frustrated “plus, it isn’t just my decision, it’s your mom’s as well.”  
  
“Uh-uh.”  
  
“Where is your mom, anyway?” she asked, looking around.  
  
“Wasn’t she in the bedroom with you?”  
  
Emma shook her head no. Henry reached for his phone in his pjs’ pocket, speed dialing his mom immediately. Regina picked up at the second ring.  
  
“Henry? Everything okay?”  
  
“Yeah, mom.”  
  
“Ask her where she is,” said Emma from behind him.  
  
“Is that Emma? Put me on speaker.”  
  
Henry did so.  
  
“I’m just heading out.”  
  
“Heading out of where?” asked both Emma and Henry at the same time.  
  
“Where are you two?”  
  
“Kitchen.”  
  
“I left you a note telling you where I was.” At the silence on the other line, she added: “on the fridge.”  
  
Both mother and son looked toward it, then shared a guilty look.  
  
“Anyway, I just came to the office to get something. I’m heading home now.”  
  
“Okay, b-”  was about to say Henry, when Emma interrupted him.  
  
“Wait, did you have breakfast yet?”  
  
“Me? No, not yet,” answered Regina on the other side. She had taken advantage of the fact that both Emma and Henry were still asleep, to slip out of the house and go grab a few books she had at the office. She also needed some time on her own to think some things through.  
  
“Good. I want to make you two one of my specialty.”  
  
“Be there in a few.” She smiled, and hung up the phone.  
  
Henry looked Emma up and down, eyebrow raised.  
  
“Trying to impress mom?”  
  
“Something like that,” she admitted.  
  
“Good.” He smiled “Will you think about what I asked you before?”  
  
“I don’t know, kid.”  
  
“Just think about it.” He got closer, squeezed her arm encouragingly, then started walking back to his room.  
  
“Hey,” she exclaimed as he was already out of earshot “I was hoping you were going to give me a hand in here.”  

 

* * *

  
  
  
There they were, an hour later, eating what Emma had prepared for breakfast. Which consisted of: scrambled eggs, bacon, toasted bread, and fresh fruit. She told them that it was nothing much, but that she still wanted to make something for the both of them. Even if she wasn’t a pro at cooking, she still managed; she had lived on her own for so long, after all.   
The fruit wasn’t usually part of her meals, but she thought she could both feed the kid something healthy, and show Regina she wasn’t all about junk food, at the same time. All she had to do was put the fruit into a bowl. Regina already had the different kinds cut up and each placed neatly in their own container. She wondered if she used magic for that.  
  
They started by eating in complete silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts. Henry asked more questions about Oz here and there; until he didn’t finish his food, and excused himself from the table. Not before giving Emma a pointed look; one even Regina, who had been immersed in her own thoughts, had noticed.  
  
“Did something happen while I was gone?” she asked.  
  
“Not really.”  
  
“What was that all about then?”  
  
“I think Henry wants me to talk to you.”  
  
“He does?”  
  
“Yeah.” Emma started fidgeting with her napkin “But we don’t have to.“  
  
“Actually… there is something I want to discuss with you as well.”  
  
Emma nodded, gulping loudly. “You can go ahead,” she told her. She needed the extra time.  
  
“Okay,” Regina said carefully “I was thinking, and you don’t have to say yes. But I was thinking maybe you can move your stuff here instead of at that empty house.”  
  
“You want me to move in?”  
  
“Well, yes.”  
  
Emma let out a nervous laugh.  
  
“What’s so funny?”  
  
“Henry told me I should move in as well.”  
  
“Did he now?”  
  
“Yeap.” She looked away, and took a sip of her coffee.  
  
“Would you?” Regina couldn’t say who was more nervous about the conversation.  
  
“I don’t know,” Emma scratched the back of her neck “I mean… wouldn’t people think it’s too soon?”  
  
“Maybe. Or maybe not. I could tell you that considering we have been raising a son together for a while now, our relationship doesn’t follow norms. But I won’t get into that, because it ultimately comes down to one thing.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Whether you do want to or not.” Regina reached for Emma’s hand still fidgeting with the napkin, and placed hers on it “And you can always use the guest room. I would just feel more secure with both you and Henry under the same roof.”  
  
“The thing is…” she started, before lightly biting the inside of her cheek.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Thing is… I do want to.”  
  
“You do?” Regina asked with a smile.  
  
Emma turned her hand under Regina’s in order to hold it, and nodded.  
  
“I should probably let mom know there has been a slightly change of plans, shouldn’t I?”  
  
“Do as you wish.”  
  
She nodded again, looked down at their hands, then turned her attention back to the other woman.  
  
“Oh, and… Regina?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“I wouldn’t mind repeating last night, and be your little spoon.” She had never allowed anyone else to hold her like that before. Not that she had had many serious relationships in the past. But with Regina it had felt so natural. All of it had.  
  
Regina smiled widely now, then brought Emma’s hand to her lips and placed soft kisses on her fingertips.

 

* * *

  
  
  
Dropping the last of the three boxes of stuff she had accumulated in her life so far on the passenger seat, she let out a low sigh. She then closed the car door, not even bothering locking it up, and walked back to the loft.  
She stopped in front of the green door, her eyes tracing the outline of the golden ‘3’ on it. She passed a hand through her hair, and pushed the door open.  
  
“Well, that was the last one.” She looked around to confirm what she had just said.  
  
“Sit here for a moment?” asked Charming from his place sitting at the table. Neal was in a highchair next to him.  
  
“Okay,” she agreed, and sat down.  
  
Long minuted passed where neither of them knew where to begin. The only sound in the loft was of the baby playing with a telephone toy. Charming broke the silence first, asking her if she wanted tea; which she refused.  
  
“Cocoa?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“I don’t understand,” blurted out Emma, louder than she intended, the moment her father had sat down again with two mugs of cocoa. Neal looked up from his toy and stared at her.  
  
“Sorry,” she continued “She told me she would be here when I’d come pick up the boxes. She told me the time and all. And now…”  
  
“She went to have lunch with Aurora and Ashley. No kids.”  
  
“Bulls-” she looked at her baby brother “Bull! I’m sure she made other arrangements when I texted her yesterday.”  
  
“Look, Emma,” Charming started very calmly, hands around his mug “She just thinks this is all… too soon.”  
  
“What did you do the moment you woke mom up from that sleeping curse?” she asked, tilting her head. She knew the answer, of course. Everyone knew the answer; everyone had heard the story.  
  
“I proposed. We got engaged.”  
  
“Regina and I have True Love, too. And it’s not like we are getting married,” she protested “And, not that I am counting, but we shared two True Love kisses already. And a half, if you include the almost one in Camelot.”  
  
“Two?!?”  
  
She explained him their adventure in Oz barely 24 hours prior. She knew this story by heart now, even Regina’s side of it.  
  
“You okay?” he asked at the end of it.  
  
“Yeah.” She took a big gulp of her cocoa.  
  
“Look, Emma,” Charming said again, while extending his index finger toward his son, which he took in his little hand “I think your mother was still getting used to the idea of not having you at the loft. And now she thinks you are choosing Regina over us.”  
  
“It’s not the same thing.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“What do you think?” It had become so rare having some time alone with her dad lately. It was refreshing having a conversation just the two of them.  
  
“Between you and me?” He pushed a button on his son’s toy, then turned to face Emma “I am completely on board with you moving out.”  
  
“You are?” she asked surprised.  
  
“Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of having you in our life. But… we have barely had time to be just your mom and I after the first curse broke, with all the villains and change of realms.”  
  
“Plus, you are all grown up now. You need your own space.” he finished.  
  
“Thank you, dad.”  
  
He smiled. “That’s also why I am grateful you are moving in with Regina, and not in that empty house.”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“So you can enjoy Henry growing up first hand,” he said with a sad smile, thinking back at all the crucial years in her life they had missed.  
  
“Can I ask you something?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“Doesn’t mom know how you feel about all of this? I thought you two didn’t have secrets with each other.”  
  
“Oh, we don’t. She knows how I feel. We just don’t let external things get between us.”  
  
“Got it,” she got up, and walked around the table in order to plant a light kiss on her brother’s head “I am glad at least one of you gets me.”  
  
“Give her some time.”  
  
“Okay,” she agreed, not completely convinced “I should go now.”  
  
“Do you have any plans for lunch?”  
  
She shook her head no.  
  
“Granny’s?” he asked, hoping to spend some more time with her. He completely backed her up on her decision, their talk had made him nostalgic just the same.  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“Who is at the station, anyway?” she asked as he was gathering everything the baby would need outside the house.  
  
“August. He has been helping a lot this past week or so. We mostly get phone calls from people needing reassurance that we are not leaving them with no magical protection again. I start my shift later on this afternoon.”  
  
“Want me to take it off your hands?”  
  
“You sure?”  
  
“Yeah.” Hands deep in her jeans’ pocket “I need to get back to work.”

 

* * *

  
  
  
Right after their lunch, Emma drove herself to the mansion. She brought all the boxes in the foyer. And looked through her stuff for at least half an hour before she gave up. She was looking for her phone. The day before she had texted Snow from Henry’s phone, sure she was going to find hers at the loft. She had looked inside every pocket, even through her personal stuff in the bathroom, but she had had no luck. That’s another thing they don’t tell you when you become a Dark One: your belongings can get lost in the process. She was sure she had the stupid thing in her pocket when she had taken in the darkness. It was probably somewhere in Camelot, for all she knew. She obviously needed a new one. Well, right now she needed to let Regina know she was going to be at work.   
Remembering the previous morning, she walked into the kitchen, and left a note on the fridge. It read: ‘going at the station. Call me there if you need anything. Won’t be home for dinner.’ She looked at it for a moment, then added: ‘my phone ???’ It looked like a telegram, but it had to do. There wasn’t any more space left on the whiteboard.

 

* * *

  
  
She walked into the kitchen again at 10:27 that same night; going straight for the fridge, this time to get herself a bottle of water. Her throat was dry from having answered all those phone calls Charming had warned her about. In addition to the worries he had already mentioned to her, people had started asking her if it was true she wasn’t ‘a villain anymore’ as soon as they realized they were talking to her. She didn’t know or recognize half the people who had called. A few times when the phone had rang for the hundredth time, she had hoped that maybe it was Snow calling. She knew it wasn’t likely, but she still hoped. Then she had hoped Regina would call her as well. Which she didn’t, she had probably understood she needed some space.  
  
“Hey,” said Regina from behind her.  
  
“Hey,” she said back, after swallowing the water, and turning around.  
  
“Are you hungry? There is some leftovers from our dinner.”  
  
“Nah,” she replied, passing a hand through her hair “I just need a shower.”  
  
“Okay,” Regina gave her a soft smile, she could sense something was troubling her.  
  
Thirty minutes later, Emma stepped out of the bathroom and into the bedroom. She was wearing her usual mismatched pjs. She found Regina in bed, a book in her hands.  
  
“Are you done in there?” she asked, tilting her head toward the bathroom. At Emma’s nod, she placed a bookmark in her book, and placed it closed on her nightstand.  
  
When Regina got out, she found Emma laying on her back on her side of the bed, arm covering her eyes. She slipped into bed as well.  
  
“Snow wasn’t there today,” Emma whispered.  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“She is still not okay with me moving out. Dad says it has nothing to do with me moving here specifically, but…”  
  
“But?”  
  
“I don’t know. My gut tells me it does.”  
  
“Want to know what I think?”  
  
“Of course,” Emma said, after finally removing her arm from her face, and looking at the woman laying next to her.  
  
“Knowing Snow… She was probably thrown off by us sharing a True Love Kiss, without knowing you had feelings for me first. You know how she is… she wants to know everything.”  
  
“It’s not like I was keeping a secret from her. I didn’t actually know myself until I became the Dark One. And then…”  
  
“I know.”  
  
Emma sighed, then turned on her side, giving her her back.  
  
Regina turned on her side as well, scooting closer, not enough to touch her.  
  
“May I?” she asked. At Emma’s nod, she got close enough to spoon her.  
  
“You know she’ll come around, right?”  
  
“Yeah, I know.” Her voice still had a hint of sadness in it.  
  
Regina wrapped her arm around her even tighter, bringing her closer to herself, bending her legs under Emma’s.  
  
“At least dad is okay with it.” She placed her hand on top of Regina’s, now placed on her stomach, and intertwined their fingers together.  
  
Regina smiled to herself, before placing a soft kiss on Emma’s shoulder.  
  
“I’ll put the boxes away first thing in the morning,” said Emma, just now remembering she hadn’t even bothered unpacking. She was now worried she had sent the wrong message with that.  
  
“Take your time,” said Regina instead, surprising her “I already made some space for you here and there between the drawers and the walking closet.”  
  
“Thank you,” she whispered, grateful.  
  
Regina placed even more soft kisses on her shoulder in response, holding her as tight as possible.   
  
Between Regina’s cuddles and the tiredness from the long day had, Emma was asleep in record time. Regina fell asleep not too long after.

 

* * *

  
  
“You okay?” Regina asked her, tightening her hold on her hand as they walked on the sidewalk. Henry was walking a few feet ahead of them.  
  
“Yeah. I hope I’ll get the chance to talk to Snow alone.”  
  
It was two Saturdays after Emma had moved all her things into the mansion. Roughly two weeks of not being able to spend a few minutes alone with her mother; she knew she had been avoiding her, but couldn’t understand why. She did have a hunch, of course, but she still wanted to hear it from her.  
  
“We’ll make sure you do,” reassured Regina, circling her thumb on the hand she was holding.  
  
“Yeah, ma,” Henry exclaimed with a big smile. He had turned around to say that, and now he was turning the other way again. He then rounded the corner into Granny’s.  
  
Gold was finally getting his so much requested family dinner. Belle had managed to persuade him into waiting a bit longer; she was afraid that he would suddenly drop on the ground for straining himself too much too soon after his two weeks of being in a coma-like state. The dinner had actually been turned into a small gathering at Granny’s: a few other people besides the Charmings and the Mills had been invited.  
  
So, there they were in front of Granny’s.  
  
“Ready?” asked Henry, hand on the doorknob. He turned around to face them at the lack of answer. Emma nodded slightly.  
  
“Go ahead, sweetheart,” Regina told him. And as he pulled the door open, she whispered into Emma’s ear.  
  
“Don’t forget Rumple wants to apologize to you.”  
  
Emma nodded again at that.  
  
Inside the diner, they were immediately greeted by Charming. He was holding Neal in his arms.  
  
“Hey, dad,” Emma said with an awkward smile, she then leaned forward to kiss her baby brother.  
  
“Where is mom?” she asked, looking around.  
  
Rumple poked his head out of a nearby booth and called for Regina before she could hear the reply. She encouragingly squeezed Emma’s hand, then let it go and walked toward the booth.  
  
“Could you sit here for a moment?” he tilted his chin toward the empty seat in front of him.  
  
“What can I do for you?” she asked as she sat down.  
  
“Nothing.” He smiled “I wanted to thank you for the protection spell around the house.”  
  
After putting the protection around the shop, they had decided the house needed it as well. Him and Belle couldn’t have possibly have kept living behind the shop. Belle had done that when Rumple was unable to move, of course. With Rumple awake, though, they needed the comfort of their home, so they had asked Regina for help with the magic.  
Belle had, during one of their meet ups to try and understand why Regina and Emma had been transported to Oz. Regina hadn’t seen Rumple since the day Belle had woken him up.  
  
“You are welcome.”  
  
“Will you ever use magic again?” asked Regina after a long silence, in which she had hoped she could go check on Emma, but didn’t want to get up and be rude.  
  
“I don’t think so,” said Rumple, his face serious “I know I could use light magic. But I’m afraid it will bring me to want to use dark magic again.”  
  
“Belle and I are finally in a good place,” he continued “I don’t want to risk that.”  
  
Regina nodded in understanding. It wasn’t easy having to give up on magic completely. Especially dark magic.  
  
“Here you are,” said Belle approaching the booth “hi, Regina.”  
  
Regina said hello back. Rumple moved his cane at the far end of the booth, scooted over toward it, making room for his wife. Regina took advantage of the situation to look toward the entrance. Emma and Charming were no longer standing in front of it; they were sitting at the counter instead, two beers in front of them. Henry wasn’t too far away from them, kneeling in front of Neal’s stroller. The baby’s laughters came from inside it. She turned around to face the married couple again.  
  
When the last of the people came in, both Belle and Rumple got up. He wanted to say a few words: thank everyone for accepting his invitation, and apologize to them for the past all at once. His new blank slate had been taken as seriously as recovering from addiction. Magic had been kind of an addiction for him, anyway.  
  
Regina followed them with her eyes as they walked in the middle of the room. As Gold started addressing everyone, she noticed Emma slipping out of the front door. She followed her.  
  
“Emma?” she called for her.  
  
Emma turned around and smiled. Her eyes were sad.  
  
“What did Charming tell you?” she asked, getting closer.  
  
“Snow has the flu, he said.” She always switched between calling her ‘mom’ and calling her ‘Snow’; ‘Snow’ was easier most of the time.  
  
“You don’t believe that?”  
  
She shrugged, then extended her hand toward Regina.  
“Wanna go home?” she asked, taking Emma’s hand in hers.  
  
“You don’t want to hear what Gold has to say?”  
  
“Not really.” Regina looked at the building behind them “I’ll go get Henry.”  
  
“Wait,” said Emma, loosening her hand holding Regina’s, anyway “I can text him.”  
  
Regina nodded, and intertwined their fingers together. Emma reached for her back pocket with her other hand, and took out her new phone. ‘Kid, come outside. We’re going home,’ she typed quickly.  
  
Not even two minutes later, the door opened again and Henry was next to them.  
  
“Thank God,” he exclaimed “Grandpa was still talking.”  
  
“Did you two eat something in there?” Regina asked after a bit of walking in silence. They had walked there since it was the beginning of may and it was pleasant walking outside in the late afternoons.  
  
“Nope,” said Emma. Henry shook his head no.  
  
“Neither have I,” Regina said. They hadn’t planned on walking out that early “Choose what you want for tonight, we are getting take out.”  
  
The prospect of food animated the conversation considerably. Regina watched as her girlfriend and her son went back and forth, arguing about which restaurant served the best of this or that. At the end they settled for tacos, then looked at her for final approval.  
  
“Tacos it is,” she conceded with a smile.  
  
In the past two weeks, with Emma moving in, they had started their own routine. On weekdays, the kid would go to school, and Regina to work. Emma would prepare breakfast when she had her morning shift at the station. Regina would prepare it when she had night shifts, letting her sleep in, and setting something aside for when she woke up. Same thing was for dinner: whoever was home cooked. Or ordered out. They were still trying to find a balance for everything else.   
They had had only one disruption free weekend, which they spent binge watching tv shows just the three of them. They were still catching up from the latest curse and absence from the town.  
Overall, they couldn’t have been happier; both when it came to their relationship with their son, and their own romantic one. Both Emma and Regina were slowly getting to know the other, and were enjoying every minute of it.  
  
After the tacos, and after some more TV with the kid, they made their way to the bedroom. They laid down under the light covers, Regina being the little spoon this time; Emma’s arm was loosely around her waist. Their legs were intertwined together. Regina’s arm was placed on top of Emma’s, the other one under her head.  
They fell asleep like that just moments before the blinding light enveloped them again.


	9. Chapter 9

“Milady.”  
  
Without removing her gaze from where she was focused on, Emma lightly punched the man next to her. She didn’t need to turn around to hit him precisely in the stomach.  
  
“Don’t call me that,” she protested “what’s wrong with you?”  
  
“Me?” he whined, hands holding on where he had been hit “I am not the one that punched you. I was just trying to get your attention.”  
  
“Don’t be a big baby. I barely touched you.” She looked at him for a split second anyway, to make sure he was really joking, then looked ahead again.  
  
“Fine,” he conceded “what are you looking at, anyway?”  
  
“Who is that?” she asked instead.  
  
“That dashing guard?” he teased, his arms ready to protect his stomach.  
  
She faced him this time, and laughed. “I am not gonna hit you,” she told him, looking him in the eye “come on, you know I am talking about her.”  
  
“You don’t know who that is?”  
  
“If I knew, I wouldn’t be wasting time asking you.” She rolled her eyes.  
  
“She is the Queen of this realm.”  
  
“Is she now?” She looked at said Queen again, licking her dry lips “Any King or Queen at her side?”  
  
“Not that I am aware of.”  
  
Emma turned around and raised an eyebrow at him.  
  
“Be a pal…” he said, imitating her voice.  
  
“Yeah, be a pal, August. You owe me.”  
  
“I’m not sure last time counts.”  
  
“I was an excellent wing-woman, as usual; what happens after is not up to me.”  
  
“Fine,” he sighed, then made his way toward the Queen and her guards.   
  
When he was close enough, he cleared his throat. He then immediately bowed before the Queen. “Your Majesty.”  
  
“Yes?” She looked at him annoyed, waiting for him to stand straight “What do you want?”  
  
“It’s not me, Your Majesty.”  
  
“Drop the formalities,” she ordered him, before chuckling “let me guess: your friend wants to meet me.”  
“Yes,” he confirmed “she…”  
  
That caught her attention, causing August and the guard he had been looking at to share a knowing look.  
  
“She?” the Queen raised an eyebrow “Where is she?”  
  
August pointed at Emma, who was now looking down at her own boots.  
  
She pursed her lips for a moment, then agreed.  
  
“Fine, but you’ll have to walk with us.”  
  
August nodded, and quickly went to get Emma.  
  
“Hi,” said Emma, as soon as she was in front of the Queen.  
  
“I mean,” she tried to curtsy while she quickly added: “Your Majesty.”  ‘Tried’ was the key word. She had been taught to curtsey as a kid, and always in dresses. Now, she had tried to grab at an invisible one, since she was wearing pants. The whole thing had ended up looking very awkward. Which was how Emma felt standing in front of the other woman. She was the most beautiful woman she had ever sat eyes on.  
  
“Hi is fine,” said the Queen “tell me, what’s your name?”  
  
“Emma.” She smiled shyly “What is yours?”  
  
“My name is Regina,” she said, flipping her hair back. It had become an automatic gesture whenever she had to tell someone what her name was. Not that a lot of people asked her.  
  
“Perfect name for a Queen,” Emma grinned.  
  
At Regina’s pleased expression, she added: “I am not as ignorant as I look.”  
  
“I never thought you were.”  
  
They took each other in for a few moments, slowly trailing their eyes down the other woman’s body. Regina was wearing a velvety red coat over tight black leather pants and black boots. Black leather gloves on her hands.  
Emma, instead, was wearing a blue vest over tight darker blue pants and below the knee boots. Unlike Regina’s, hers didn’t include high heels.  
  
“Shall we?” asked Regina at last.  
  
Emma nodded, and they started walking. August and the two royal guards followed close behind.  
  
“You are not from here,” said Regina. More a statement than a question.  
  
“How do you know?”  
  
“I would have remembered about you.” Regina glanced at the other from the corner of her eye: Emma, slightly embarrassed, was bringing a hand to the back of her head.  
  
“Where are you from then?”  
  
“Uhmm…” Emma cleared her throat, eyes glues to her moving feet “the realm five miles west from here.”  
  
She was hoping she wouldn’t get any more questions on the subject. At the lack of reply, she looked up just in time to see an arrow get an inch away from her face. The pointy weapon stopped there, before it turned into ashes thanks to a flick of Regina’s hand. She turned around, mouth agape, lost for words. Before she could thank her, the trio behind them came rushing forward.  
  
“Your Majesty,” said one of the guards “we must leave. Now.”  
  
Being brought to reality by the urgency in his words, Regina nodded slowly.  
  
Emma looked as they started to move away quickly, too quickly. She regained her voice just in time.  
  
“I need to see you,” she told Regina, who was now looking at her in the eye “alone.”  
  
Despite her guards’ concerned looks, she agreed.  
  
“Tonight. At sunset. Near the lake.”  
  
“I’ll be there.”  
  
“There is no time,” Regina told her guards, before raising a hand and poofing themselves away.  
  
As purple smoke was disappearing in front of Emma’s still shocked eyes, August approached her.  
  
“You okay?” he asked, placing a hand on her shoulder.  
  
“Yeah, I’m good.”  
  
“Let’s go then, we have time to track our assignment down before your rendezvous with the Queen.”  
  
“That was a close one,” he commented as they started walking.  
  
“Yup.”  
  


* * *

 

  
  
“With all due respect, Your Majesty, I…”  
  
“Yes?” She focused her attention on the reflection of her guard in the mirror in front of her. She was picking a pair of earrings.  
  
“I don’t think you should go meet that woman alone.”  
  
“Emma,” Regina corrected him “and why is that?”  
  
“She could be a spy, she…”  
“I doubt that.” She interjected “But if that makes you feel better, you can ride along and see if she brings that friend of hers. Maybe you two can keep each other busy while we talk.”  
  
At her guard’s lowered head, she continued: “Worst case scenario, we can use him as collateral. Now, go check if the horses are ready.”  
  
“Yes, Your Majesty.”  
  
He was already out the room, when she called for him.  
  
“You have good taste.”  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
“I have seen how you two looked at each other. Best case scenario, you get to know him better,” she said, still looking at the reflection in the mirror. She had just opted for silver earrings matching the buttons on her light blue riding coat. She had also changed her leather pants for more comfortable riding ones.  
  
“You have good taste,” she repeated.  
  
“Thank you, Your Majesty.” He smiled, before running out the room.  
  


* * *

 

  
  
Half an hour later, Regina was slowly approaching the meeting place, horse at her side. Emma was already there.  
  
“Hi,” said Emma with a bashful smile as soon as she saw her “thank you for coming.”  
  
“Of course.” Regina smiled back “Is your friend…”  
  
“August?”  
  
“Yes. Is he here?”  
  
“Down at he pub nearby, why?”“Do you mind if I send my guard to keep him company?”  
  
“Of course not.” Emma wasn’t surprised by the request. Royals never truly traveled alone.  
  
Regina motioned toward the trees behind her, and the guard appeared from behind them; he was still on his horse. He rode past them.  
  
“What’s his name?” Emma asked, pointing at the horse. She had a specific reason for asking her to meet again. She didn’t know how to approach the subject, though.  
  
“His name is Henry,” Regina replied, petting the animal on the head.  
  
“That’s an unusual name for a horse.” Emma moved closer.  
  
“I named him after my father.”  
  
“How does he feel about having a horse named after him?”  
  
“He died a couple of years ago.” She looked at Emma with a bittersweet smile “I think he would have liked it, though.”  
  
“Oh, I’m sorry.”  
  
“It’s okay,” Regina said, but changed the subject nonetheless “I never got the chance to ask you what you were doing away from your own realm.”  
  
“We catch bandits. Me and August, I mean.”  
  
“Is that so?” Regina raised her eyebrow.  
  
“Yeah. Our current target is a known frequenter of the pub nearby. We are waiting for him to show up.”  
  
“What if he doesn’t?”  
  
“We’ll have to find another way.”  
  
Regina nodded, then asked: “You didn’t ask me to meet again to talk about your target, did you?”  
  
“No. Uhm…” She gestured to a flat rock that looked like an half stone bench “Can we sit?”  
  
“So?” asked Regina after they sat down.  
  
Emma cleared her throat. “You know how you literally saved me from that arrow earlier, with magic? Thank you, by the way.”  
  
“You are welcome.” She smiled, her expression a bit tense now “What about it?”  
  
“I…” Emma started, wanting to explain. She decided to show her instead. With a flick of her hand, she raised a few stones off the ground. Another flick, and they were flying toward the lake, bouncing a few times off its surface, before sinking down.  
  
Regina followed everything closely, then turned around to face the other woman again. Her mouth formed a perfect ‘o’.  
  
“You have magic too?” she asked.  
  
“I do. That’s why I wanted to see you again. I… I never met anyone else who had magic before.”  
  
“Since you are from the White Kingdom, I am not surprised.”  
  
“What do you mean?” Emma asked with a puzzled look on her face.  
  
“I was born there.”  
  
“You were?”  
  
“Yes. I lived there for the majority of my life.”  
  
“How did you become Queen of this realm?”  
Regina tilted her head, trying to decide whether to give the stranger more personal info than she had ever shared with anyone before. When she saw no malice into the green eyes staring back at her, she decided she could trust her.  
  
“When I was in my twenties, someone tried to kill my mother. She was very abusive, but she was still my mother… so, I tried to heal her with my magic. I wasn’t able to save her. My magic still got the Queen’s attention since I had to use it out in the open. My father and I were banished the very next day. He was a well respected Prince, so it didn’t take him much to gain the approval of this unclaimed realm.”  
  
The people had loved her father almost as much as she had loved him. He was kind to everyone. Helped whoever was in need. Regina aimed to do just the same.  
  
“The Queen… Queen Snow?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
Emma’s face went pale at that.  
  
“What is it?” asked Regina worried.  
  
“She… she is my mother.”  
  
Regina widened her eyes, she was suddenly feeling a bit dizzy.  
  
Sounds of an approaching horse freezes them both on the spot.  
  
“Emma!” exclaimed Regina’s guard “Quick, August needs your help.”  
  
He stopped in front of a now standing Emma, offering her his hand.  
  
Emma looked at a still shocked Regina. “Please, can you meet me again here in the morning? I need to explain,” she told her with pleading eyes. She then hopped on the horse behind the guard, and looked down at Regina.  
  
“I’ll think about it,” was the only thing she said, before she watched the horse ride away.  
  


* * *

  
  
As soon as they had been able to immobilize their target (already half drunk when Emma got there) and hand him to the local sheriff, August apologized for having interrupted her meeting with the Queen.  
  
They were sitting at one of the tables at the pub. Two free beers in front of them. The owner was grateful for the way they had helped get rid of a scumbag.  
  
“We both know you are the best at that part of the job.”  
  
She shrugged slightly. “Things weren’t going well anyway.”  
  
“What happened?”  
  
“I’ll tell you tomorrow, okay?” She didn’t wait for his reply, that she added: “Right now I need to finish this and get to sleep. I’m meeting her again in the morning.”  
  
“If she shows up, that is,” she continued, after taking a generous gulp.  
  
August wanted to question her further, but knew it wasn’t the time for that.  
  
“Mind if I stay for another round? he asked instead.  
  
“Not at all.” She got up, fished a few coins out of her pocket and placed them on the table “Have this one on me.”  
  
“Thanks,” he replied, but she was already talking to the owner, asking if they also had rooms. She didn’t feel like walking around looking for a place to sleep for the night. Luckily, they did have rooms.  
  
  
The next morning, she woke up before dawn to the sound of August snoring loudly on the small bed next to hers. She wondered how many other rounds he had had when she had left him, probably three or four. She chuckled at that in her own head, before quietly slipping out of bed and out of the room.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
Against her guards’ advice, and her own better judgment, Regina had decided to meet Emma. She woke up shortly after dawn. Quickly putting on her riding clothes, she exited her castle and went to fetch Henry in the stables.  
  
She was curious to hear Emma’s explanation. After her dad had died a couple of years earlier, taking control of the kingdom, she had decided to send some of her best people to check on Snow. There weren’t reports of any daughters at the castle, only words of Snow’s husband having died not too long after she had been banished from the realm. She wondered what was the story there. She trusted her sources enough to know that if there had been signs of a daughter, she would have already been aware of that.  
  
When she arrived at the lake, she found Emma already there, sitting on the same rock from the previous night. Coming from behind her, she thought she would hear her; or at least the horse. When she didn’t, Regina cleared her throat.  
  
Emma jumped on her feet and faced her. Surprised written all over her face.  
  
“You came?!?” it sounded more like a question than a statement.  
  
“I did.” Regina’s voice was colder than intended.  
  
“Can I… can I explain?”  
  
Regina nodded, taking a few steps closer.  
  
“When I was 18, my m… Queen Snow told me she had finally banished the last of the magic wielders from our realm. Well, her realm. I didn’t know it was you until yesterday.”  
  
The fact that she hadn’t even been mentioned by name got to her fast. Before she knew it, she was raising her voice.  
  
“How can I know I should trust you now? I have never even seen you growing up there.”  
  
Emma flinched at that, taking a step back.  
  
“You don’t. I…”  
  
“What?” Regina’s voice was lower now, but still very much filled with anger.  
  
“She banished me too,” Emma finally blurted out.  
  
“She… what?”  
  
“I really think I should have started at the beginning.” Emma laughed nervously, scratching a spot on her cheek.  
  
“Sorry, Emma, for snapping at you like that.” Regina sat down and looked up at her “I won’t interrupt you this time. If you still want to tell me.”  
  
She ran her hands up and down the front of her legs, then sat down as well.  
  
“To answer your question,” she started, looking into brown eyes “I have lived a very secluded childhood. I only got to be friends with August because he lived on castle’s grounds. His father was Queen Snow’s best adviser. Still is, I suppose.”  
  
She took a deep breath before proceeding with the story.  
  
“Like I told you, I was 18 when you were banished. When I was 21, my father got very ill and died within months. I think at that point my mother and I were just waiting to see who would snap first. He was the one that kept our family together.” She ran a hand through her long curls “I thought it’d be her, and I was right. It didn’t happen the way I thought it would. By then I was aware I had magic, I had managed not to let her find out. We lived two different lives at that point. Until one day… she saw me using my magic on August. We had been practicing with our swords in the middle of the courtyard, when I accidental cut him badly. I had no other alternative than to heal him as quickly as possible. That’s when she banished me; first from the castle’s grounds, then from the whole White Kingdom. It’s been ten years since I set foot in it.”  
  
Regina had kept her word about not interrupting. She had watched as Emma’s eyes had gotten wet as she was recounting her story. She had quickly turned around at one point, her eyes were dry again when she had looked back at her.  
  
“Did she banish August as well?” she asked once she was sure the story was over.  
  
“No.” She shook her head “He decided to come with me. We grew up together, you know?”  
  
“Where have you been all these years?”  
  
“We travelled out east most of the time. We just recently got close enough to the realm we once called home.”  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
“It is what it is,” Emma almost dismissed it “Do you trust me now?”  
  
“I do.” Regina smiled softly, causing Emma to smile back at her. “I do trust you, Emma.”  
  
Without realizing it, they had moved closer considerably compared to when they had first sat down. They had started with enough space between them that another person could have easily fit there; they had ended up with their knees touching.  
  
At Regina’s last words, they both felt a pull toward the other woman. Emma gently placed a hand on Regina’s thigh, while Regina placed her hand on Emma’s bicep. They leaned forward then, going for a kiss, when an arrow passed between their faces. It almost grazed the tip of their noses.  
  
Jumping into action at the same time, they both started using their magic against the several arrows coming their way. Magic wasn’t Emma’s first go to weapon; she didn’t have any alternatives though, nervous and eager to get to the lake, she had forgotten her sword next to the bed. That had been for the best: the moment the arrows started coming from all directions at once, their individual magic combined. It first started glowing yellow and red, then it blasted outward, sending both their attacker and their weapons flying far away.  
  
Still shocked by the attack and the magic, they both stood there in silence, before making sure the other was truly okay.  
  
“I recognized one of them,” admitted Emma “she was older than I remember, of course. But I could recognize her anywhere: she was my mother’s best guard.”  
  
“So, the attacks come from Snow’s orders?”  
  
“The attacks are meant for me.”  
  
“How can you be so sure?”  
  
 “Have you had anything like this happen to you before?”  
  
Regina shook her head no.  
  
“They were meant for me, I was the target,” Emma said firmly “Words must have gotten to her that I was here.”  
  
“I must warn August,” she added quickly “if they can’t get to me, they will surely try and get to him first.”  
  
“I’m coming with you.”  
  
“No,” she said, placing her hands on Regina’s shoulders “you need to go somewhere safe. I’m sure they know who you are by now, and from your history with their Queen, they won’t think twice about getting rid of you too.”  
  
“Okay,” Regina agreed, very reluctantly so “but be careful.”  
  
“I will.”  
  
Emma took a few steps in the direction of the pub where she was sure her friend was still sleeping in, then stopped.  
  
She raised her eyebrow, turned around, and stepped closer to Regina again. The same pull in the pit of her stomach felt just minutes before was telling her to do so. Regina felt it as well.  
  
Emma grabbed her by the waist, while Regina got on her tip toes and held on to Emma’s biceps. They finally kissed, triggering the True Love magic that transported them somewhere else.


	10. Chapter 10

They landed at the foot of the bed, still holding on to the other as they had done before the kiss. They looked at each other in the eye for a moment, making sure that both had all the right memories back. When they got a confirmation of that, they relaxed considerably. Regina’s arms sneaked under Emma’s to hold her tight, her head leaning on her shoulder. Emma tightened her grip around Regina’s waist, before planting a kiss on top of her head.  
  
As they both calmed down completely, they let go of the hug. Without talking, almost in sync, they walked out of the room. They had no idea how long they had been away, no idea where Henry was. Stepping out into the hallway, they were immediately comforted by Henry’s loud snoring coming from his room. Tiptoeing toward it, Regina got closer to the semi-open door, Emma followed her lead. Regina put her head around it, while Emma tried to get a pick above her head. Inside, their son was splayed on his back in the middle of the bed, his covers and sheet on the floor. His moms smiled and retreated back to their room, still tiptoeing.  
  
“How long have we been gone?” asked Regina as Emma was closing the door behind her.  
  
Emma reached for her phone charging on her nightstand, and read the date. “It’s Sunday, the day after the party?! It’s only 5:18 in the morning.”  
  
“We haven’t even been gone six hours?” Regina blurted out, then covered her mouth with her hands.  
  
“Looks like it,” said Emma placing her phone back in its place “we are letting the kid sleep, right?”  
  
“Yes,” Regina replied, before yawning “might as well go back to sleep too.”  
  
“I was hoping you’d say that,” she said after yawning herself. She was about to get on the bed, when Regina stopped her…  
  
“Wait!”  
  
“What?”  
  
“I think we should do something about these first.” She pointed at the clothes they were still wearing from the parallel universe they had just come back from.  
  
“Oh.” Emma looked down, she hadn’t even noticed what she was wearing “Right.”  
  
With a flick of her hand, Regina magicked their clothes away, leaving both with just their underwear on. Storybrooke’s kinds, not the ones they were wearing at that other realm.  
  
“Is this okay, or…?”  
  
“More than okay,” Emma grinned, then jumped on the bed.  
  
Regina smiled, she needed the skin on skin contact, and it wasn’t the first time they had slept like that. She got into bed as well.  
  
Emma was laying on her back, with an arm under her head. When Regina got closer and placed her head on her chest, she placed her free hand on Regina’s head.  
  
“It sure felt like we have been away longer,” she said, stroking her hair.  
  
“It sure did,” agreed Regina. Her hand was on Emma’s hip,  
  
“It sure does feel like I have lost my father again,” she added in a small voice.  
  
At that, Emma brought her hand to Regina’s middle. Lightly pushing her to bring her closer to herself. Regina looked up into green eyes, placed a soft kiss on Emma’s shoulder, before she leaned her head on her chest again. They fell asleep once more, this time with no magic transporting them anywhere.

* * *

  
  
  
“Moms,” Henry was knocking on the door “come on, mom. Wake up! You promised me waffles.”  
  
At the second knock, Emma snapped awake, and half yelled ‘what?’ Regina was already wrapping a bathrobe around her body and opening the door.  
  
“What time is it?” she asked.  
  
“Ten. 10:08 to be precise. You were still sleeping?”  
  
“Still trying to,” Emma yelled from the bed.  
  
“Sweetheart,” Regina placed a hand on Henry’s arm “just give us a few minutes. Why don’t you start gathering everything I’ll need for the waffles?”  
  
“Are you two drunk or something?” he asked looking at his mother on the bed, her eyes were red.  
  
“Maybe,” she said, before sticking her tongue out at him.  
  
“No,” Regina said firmly “no one is drunk. We’ll explain when we get downstairs.”  
  
Henry rolled his eyes at Emma, nodded at Regina, then walked down the hallway.  
  
“Did he seem upset?” asked Regina from her place in front of the door.  
  
“Nah,” Emma shook her head “wait until you tell him about the horse’s name.”  
  
“Crap!” She furrowed “I almost forgot about that part.”  
  
“Hey,” Emma said, sitting upright on the bed, and patting the spot in front of her “come here.”  
  
She leaned forward as Regina sat down, and placed a kiss on her cheek. “I was just teasing,” she reassured “the kid is just hungry. We are about to go feed him now, anyway.”  
  
Regina nodded. It was nice having someone else to share her worries with, especially about Henry. She was secretly always afraid of driving her son away again. Even nicer was having someone be there and reassure her that everything was going to be okay. Emma was particularly good at that, she had noticed.

 

* * *

  
  
  
“Wait,” Henry said, he had been listening carefully to his moms telling him about what had happened at the parallel universe, if that was the correct term for it “you two were strangers there?”  
  
“Yes.” Regina had a feeling she knew where he wanted to go with his questions.  
  
“And you kissed?”  
  
“Yeap.” Emma answered him this time.  
  
“You were stranger and you kissed?”  
  
Both moms nodded at the same time, Emma was taking a bite of her waffle.  
  
“So, it is okay for you two to go around kissing random people?”  
  
“It’s different,” said Regina, her hands wrapped around the mug of tea in front of her on the table.  
  
“Let me guess, it’s different because you have True Love?”  
  
“Yes.” Regina lifted the mug to her lips and took a sip from it.  
  
“Ugh.” He rolled his eyes. “You are starting to sound like grandma and grandpa.”  
  
“Hold on,” Emma protested almost chocking on her food. She brought a hand to her chest before taking a big gulp of her coffee. She then cleared her throat and continued.  
  
“It’s different because we didn’t just meet and started kissing,” she bit at her lower lip “we, well... we got to know each other a bit. And there was this feeling... I guess it was because of True Love, and...”  
  
Regina gently placed a hand on Emma’s back, making small circular motions.  
  
“Relax,” she told her “he is just teasing us now.”  
  
At that, Henry started laughing.  
  
“Not cool, kid,” Emma pouted “not cool.”  
  
“I’m sorry.” He was still laughing. “You should have seen your face.”  
  
“Go ahead,” she turned to face Regina “don’t let me stop you from laughing.”  
  
“While it was funny, that wasn’t the most babbling I have seen come out of your mouth.”  
  
When Henry started laughing even harder, Emma squinted her eyes at him.  
  
“Huh, okay... if you don’t stop now, I’ll eat your food as well.” She stood up, fork in her hand, and leaned over ready to take his waffle away.  
  
“No, no,” he was suddenly very serious again “I’m done. See?”  
  
Emma grinned while sitting down. She wasn’t really mad at the kid, she liked the way they could so easily play around with one another. There was a certain sense of belonging she felt whenever she was with Regina and Henry that she had never experienced with anyone else before. She smiled to herself at the thought.  
  
“The horse was named Henry?” he was now asking.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Tell me about him,” he asked in and enthusiastic tone “Was he any good?”  
  
“He was my own personal horse, of course he was good.” Regina pursed her lips thinking of what else to tell her son. “He was a beautiful shade of brown with a black mane. Oh, now that I think about it, he had very unusual green eyes. The same color as yours.”  
  
Henry smiled so widely at the description, his eyes were sparkling.

* * *

 

  
  
As usual, after breakfast, Henry had left his two moms alone in the kitchen. He had asked them if he could go meet with some of his friends from school, and they had both agreed.  
  
Regina had cleared out the table and Emma had washed the dishes. Now, drying her hands off on a washcloth, Emma sat down next to Regina at the table.  
  
“Who is that?” she asked.  
  
“Belle,” Regina replied after finishing typing her text and placing the phone on the table “I caught her up on out latest adventure.”  
  
“The no memory land,” Emma said in a dramatic voice.  
  
“I guess you can call it that.”  
When her phone pinged again, Regina reached for it, typed a new reply, then turned around to face Emma. “I’m going to meet Belle in a half an hour. She found some books at the house that belong to Rumple. She thinks they might be helpful.”  
  
“You are really hitting it off with Belle.”  
  
“Yes, I suppose you are right.” Regina nodded “After I apologized profusely for what I did to her in the past, we started to get more along. When you became Dark One, I realized we had more things in common than I would have imagined. I never really had a friend like this before.”  
  
“I’m happy you do now,” Emma said with a smile, then her eyes got sad.  
  
“What is it?”  
  
“Nothing,” she replied looking away.  
  
“Emma…” Regina placed her hand on her shoulder “you know you can tell me anything, right?”  
  
“I know.” She turned around again. “It just hit me that the last time I had a friendship like that was with Mary Margaret during the curse. Maybe Ruby, during the curse as well. I miss that.”  
  
“What about Lily?” Sliding her hand down she took Emma’s into hers “Isn’t she still in town?”  
  
“You wouldn’t mind me being friends with the first person I had a real crush on?” Emma asked with a chuckle to lighten up the mood.  
  
“Of course not.”  
  
Emma smiled at Regina’s serious expression. “I’m not sure either way. It’s been so long since we were close.”  
  
“What about August?”  
  
“True,” said Emma, a lightbulb turning on in her head “we were really close in that other life, weren’t we? I might pass by the station and see what he is up to.”  
  
“Great.” Regina smiled widely now. “Come change with me?”  
  
Emma nodded. After Henry had knocked at their door earlier in the morning, they had both opted for something comfortable to wear in the house. Especially after the not so comfortable ones they were wearing the moment they had returned home.  
  
They were almost out the house twenty minutes later, when Emma stopped in her tracks.  
  
“Hey, Regina?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“You wouldn’t by any chance know who your guard was? And who he is in Storybrooke now?  
  
“As a matter of fact, I do,” she answered, making her way toward the table under the mirror in the foyer. She then looked over her shoulder and added: “You want to play match maker?”  
  
“Hardly. I just want to give August a push in the right direction. You have seen how those two looked at one another.”  
  
Regina nodded, scribbled something down on the pad she kept on the table, tore the piece of paper out  and handed it to Emma. “This is his info.”  
  
“Thank you.” Emma smiled, before she leaned over to kiss her on the cheek.

 

* * *

  
  
  
“Hey,” exclaimed Emma as she got inside the station. The light was dimmer than usual, and August had his head propped on his desk.  
  
He looked up, his eyes red. He waved weakly at her.  
  
“I see you still got an hangover from our little adventure.” She chuckled as she walked over to where he was sitting.  
  
“It wasn’t a dream?”  
  
Emma shook her head no, grabbed a chair and brought it beside his. The chair’s feet dragging along the floor.  
  
“Ouch,” August protested at that.  
  
“Sorry.” She sat down. “And no, it wasn’t a dream.”  
  
“How did we manage that then?”  
  
“I… we still have no idea. Regina is working on it though.”  
  
“I was starting to wonder why I had such a bad hangover from having just dreamt about drinking,” he admitted “I wanted to call you to ask about it, but my head felt like bursting. I’m glad nearly no one called today.”  
  
“Want a hand with that?”  
  
He looked at her with squinted eyes, then he nodded. The headache was still too unbearable, he would totally risk it with magic if that meant getting rid of it.  
  
Emma lifted her hand and hovered over his head for a few moments. Yellowish magic pulsed between them.  
  
“Wow.” August was sitting more upright now, his eyes no longer red “Thank you! I see you are getting good with your magic.”  
  
“I am,” she brought a hand to the back of her neck, and smiled awkwardly.  
  
“You didn’t come all the way over here to heal my headache, did you?”  
  
“Well, I actually came to check how you were doing in general,” she said “and to give you something.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“This,” she placed her hand in her jacket’s pocket and took the piece of paper out.  
  
“What’s that?” he asked before reading what Regina had written on it “Marcus?”  
  
“The guard in that weird parallel universe. The one you couldn’t keep your eyes off of.”  
  
“You noticed that?”  
  
“Uh-huh. We both did. Regina gave me his info.”  
  
“Thank her for me later.”  
  
“Will do.”  
  
August looked down at the piece of paper still in his hand, and furrowed. “That’s why I hadn’t recognized him.”“What? Why?”  
  
“He teaches science at Storybrooke high.”  
  
“Oh,” Emma exclaimed “smart.”  
  
“Maybe too smart for me.”  
  
“Nonsense. Give him a call or something, I’m sure he will be happy to hear from you.”  
  
“Okay,” he agreed “So, you really have no idea why we got transported to that other universe last night?”  
  
“Nope. But I will let you know as soon as Regina and Belle find some kind of answer.”  


* * *

  
  
“What we know for sure so far is that to bring yourself back you have to share a True Love kiss,” started saying Belle. They were in the middle of her own personal library at the house she shared with Rumple. She was making a list of things they knew about what was happening to Regina and Emma.  
  
“Yes,” confirmed Regina.  
  
“And there hasn’t been anything else in common so far, right?” she asked, tapping the eraser part of the pencil on the notebook in front of her “Nothing that could have triggered those two events?”  
  
Regina shook her head no. “The first time, we were in the living room with Henry. The second time, we were already fast asleep in our bed. So, no… I don’t see any connection there.”  
  
“Any warning that it was about to happen?”  
  
“Well, when we were talking to Henry, I remember this bright light enveloping us. And the feeling of being poofed away by someone or something else.”  
  
“That’s something.”  
  
“I wish I knew what it meant.”  
  
Belle wrote something down on her notebook. “I suppose you can’t tell me if those things happened the second time around?”  
  
“I’m afraid not. All I remember is drifting off to sleep in Emma’s arms.”  
“Got it,” she wrote something else down, then looked up and smiled “I’m glad things seem to be going okay between you and Emma, though.”  
  
“So am I,” she smiled back “How are things with Rumple?”  
  
“Great,” Belle’s smile got even wider “we are taking our time getting to know each other all over again. I am loving every moment of it.”  
  
“Good! Any problem with my protection spell?”  
  
“Now that you mention it, we had a mini accident the other night.”  
  
“What happened?”  
  
“We were both already fast asleep, when we heard a blast outside the house. We went to check it out: me with a baseball bat in hand, Rumple urging me not to actually hurt anyone.”  
  
“When we got outside,” she continued “some of the dwarfs were laying around in our front yard. They were all completely drunk, and had tried to sneak in our house for whatever reason.”  
  
“Emma didn’t tell me anything about it.”  
  
“That’s because she doesn’t know. We decided not to call the sheriff. The poor guys had already been blasted off by your spell. Which is way more powerful than I had imagined.”  
  
Regina grinned. “So, no real danger there?”  
  
“No. I suppose not.”

* * *

  
  
“Guess what?” asked Regina that same night.  
  
“What?”  
  
“The dwarfs tried to sneak in Rumple’s house. While drunk.”  
  
“They did?” Emma asked with a puzzled expression “We didn’t get any call about that.”  
  
“That’s because they decided not to call the station,” Regina explained “that’s what Belle told me earlier.”  
  
“Oh.” Emma placed her elbow on the table in front of her and propped her head on her hand.  
“Is something wrong?”  
  
“I was just thinking…” Emma started, before placing her other hand under her chin as well “you are going to think it’s idiotic.”  
  
“Does it has anything to do with your parents?”  
  
Emma smiled at that: Regina had kept on calling her parents ‘the two idiots’, even though their relationship had evolved so much for the better over the past few years.  
  
“No.”  
  
“Then I won’t think such thing.”  
  
“Okay, here it goes nothing,” she said sitting upright “I was thinking about taking a few curses to learn some essential things to be a real sheriff. I know some stuff from being a bail-bond person, but there is so much… so much I don’t know about. And this job has been basically given to me by the curse, so…”  
  
“Emma,” Regina exclaimed “I think that is a really good idea.”  
  
“You do?”  
  
“Yes, of course.” She smiled gently. “Have you looked some of those up already?”  
  
“Yeap. I googled them a bit. I was thinking of taking some online classes like I did when I got my GED.”  
  
“I took online classes, too. Once upon a time.”  
  
“You did?” Emma asked surprised. There was so much she still didn’t know about her girlfriend.  
  
“Yes. With the curse, I got myself a good Bachelor Degree in Business Administration to be able to be a mayor. I got all the knowledge with it, of course. At one point though, in 1985, I felt like I wanted to actually study for it, so I took online courses to get my Masters. I believe I was one of the first few people to earn a degree from Nova Southeastern University’s then new online courses. And yes, I saw the irony in the name of the college.”  
  
“Wow. So, that fancy degree you got framed in your office is actually real?”  
  
“It is,” Regina nodded, she had always liked studying and books, even back in the Enchanted Forest.  
  
“I’m impressed.”  
  
“I had the funds to do so, and I had the time. Too much time, actually.”  
  
“Still impressed,” Emma smiled “you are such a nerd. No wonder why the kid is one too.”

* * *

  
  
A month or so later, Emma was sitting on the chaise lounge in the bedroom, going over some of her notes taken for her new online courses. She had gone to the room with the intention of placing her notebook on her nightstand in order to re-read some it before bed, when she had decided to check something out. That’s when she had sat down where she was now.  
  
“Who is the nerd now?”  
  
Emma looked up and toward the door, where Regina’s voice was coming from. When she did so, she almost chocked on nothing; her girlfriend was standing in the door-frame with nothing but one of her plaid shirts on. They had had the last couple of days all to themselves, the kid had gone on a end of the year school trip.  
  
Regina smirked at the reaction, then started to slowly enter the room, swaying her hips in the process. When she got in front of her girlfriend, she removed the notebook from her hands and placed it next to her. She then straddled her lap.  
  
“Hey,” said Emma, licking her lips, and bringing her hands to the other woman’s hips.  
  
“Hello yourself.” She leaned forward to plant a soft kiss on her lips.  
  
They shared a few more tender kisses, before they started kissing a bit more passionately. Regina looping her arms loosely around Emma’s neck, Emma bringing her hands up and under her shirt.  
  
When Regina moved backward, a whine escaped from Emma’s lips. The moment she realized it was only to start unbuttoning her shirt, she had no more complains. In the unbuttoning, Regina reviled a lacy black bra that matched her panties. Emma licked her lips once again, then lifted Regina slightly up on her lap in order to have her belly at face level. She leaned forward and started peppering kisses all over it.  
  
“Fuck,” exclaimed Regina with a moan, her hands were on Emma’s shoulders.  
  
After many more kisses, Emma sat Regina down on her lap again. They looked in each other’s eye, and that’s when it happened again: the white light enveloped them.  
  
“Son of a bi-“ exclaimed Regina as she realized she was being transported.


	11. Chapter 11

-tch,” she finished, landing on something soft. She had landed in the middle of a bush, surrounded by trees. The landing had been soft indeed, but it didn’t help that she had done so almost buck-naked, with only Emma’s plaid shirt to cover her underwear.  
  
“Who is there?” a voice came from above her in the distance “State your name and your intentions.”  
  
Regina cleared her throat. “My name is Regina, and I am looking for the Savior.” There was no time to try and deceive whoever was on the other side, not in the condition she was in: stuck and half naked. She had opted not to say she was the former Evil Queen for obvious reasons, but had decided to mention Emma’s title because it had been heard in other realms before. If she was in another realm, that was.  
  
“What do you want from him?” the voice grew nearer and angrier.  
  
“Him? The Savior I’m looking for… my Savior… is a she.”  
  
“Whoever you are, come out of there slowly.”  
  
She didn’t have the time to come up with a reply that her feet were being tickled by something that felt like animal’s fur, the next second a wet tongue licked one of her feet.  
  
“Rajah, stop it.” The voice said firmly.  
  
“Is the Savior you mentioned before Aladdin?” she tried.  
  
“How do you know about him?”  
  
“Let me explain,” she said, stopping herself from calling the other woman by her name. There was no mistaking now who she had run into.  
  
“Come out of there then.” Jasmine’s voice was anything but patient.  
  
“I’m stuck and well, indisposed, right now.”  
  
Jasmine’s head peered out down at her in between the trees. She looked at Regina’s state and blushed, turning around quickly.  
  
“I can use my magic if you give me a second.”  
  
“No!” Jasmine exclaimed “No magic. I will go get you something to put on. Don’t move.”  
  
Regina rolled her eyes at the request, as if she was going to walk around half naked with a tiger  that close.  
  
A couple of minutes later, Jasmine handed her clothes that reminded her so much of the ones used in the animated cartoon, only the one she was supposed to wear were a few shades darker. She stood up, giving the princess (or maybe Queen as far as she knew) her back, even though she was not looking in her direction anymore. She slid the plaid shirt of and slipped into the new clothes. She removed some dirt off her face and finally got out from the bushes and trees.  
  
There she realized she must have been in Jasmine’s castle walls. Specifically in the garden. There she found her sitting on the edge of the fountain in the middle of it, scimitar casually placed at her side. Rajah sitting a few feet away, staring directly at her.  
  
“Talk,” said Jasmine, getting up and grabbing the weapon “and no funny tricks with magic.”  
  
“Okay,” Regina agree a bit reluctantly, she knew she wasn’t there to hurt the other woman, but Jasmine didn’t; she still didn’t like being treated like that.  
  
“I landed here from another realm,” she started explaining. ‘Great, now I sound like an alien in a movie,’ she thought to herself.  “I’m pretty sure my girlfriend did as well, the Savior I mentioned before. I don’t know why or how we do get transported to different realms, but here I am… I just want to find her and go home.”  
  
She had failed to mention Henry in case she couldn’t trust the princess after all; also because he hadn’t been transported with them in previous occasions. At the ‘here I am’ she had gestured to herself and looked down, only then noticing the way the clothes hugged her body.  
  
“What’s this place you talk about?”  
  
“Storybrooke.”  
  
“Never heard of it,” Jasmine replied, then she said a single word that had Regina petrified on the spot “Rajah.”  
For a split second, she closed her eyes, then opened them again only to see the tiger starting to sniff her in a very not threatening way. He soon sat in front of her, and lifted his head in what she thought was an invitation to pet him. And so she did; she was extremely grateful for the fact that animals had always liked her.  
  
Jasmine, in the meanwhile, had gotten closer. She was now tilting her head and narrowing her eyes at the stranger.  
  
“You sure do look like my very first crush,” she said at last with a smile.  
  
“Too bad they didn’t include that part in the movie,” Regina said out loud without thinking.  
  
“Movie?” Even the tiger looked at her confused.  
  
“It’s like… a story about your life and adventures. Almost like a book you can watch.”  
  
“A… movie?” she repeated.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“About me?”  
  
“Well, yes. You and Aladdin.”  
  
“Are there any of those about you and your own Savior?”  
  
“No,” Regina almost smiled at the idea of having a fairytale movie about hers and Emma’s story; their love story “not that I am aware of.”  
  
“And you are sure she is here somewhere in Agrabah as well?”  
  
“Positive.” It seemed that the feeling in pit of her stomach was very much present here, and it told her Emma was in the same realm as her. “Can I use magic to track her down now?”  
  
“No!” Jasmine exclaimed again just as loudly as she had done before. Her eyes almost popping out of her head. A hand outstretched in front of her to stop Regina, even though she hadn’t given any sign of wanting to start using her magic.  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“We are trying to lay low. Jafar might come barging in if he senses magic being used.”  
  
“Didn't you defeat Jafar?”  
  
“Defeat Jafar?” Jasmine laughed nervously “We trapped him once, but he got out. It’s been almost 10 years since we did so. Since Aladdin and I met.”  
  
“Wow. There isn’t any of that in the movie.”  
  
“This movie sounds like it left a lot of important things out.”  
  
Regina nodded in agreement. “I must go find Emma then.”  
  
“I’m coming with you,” Jasmine said, recognizing the determination in the other woman’s eyes “if that is okay with you.”  
  
“Never tell a Princess or Queen what to do in her own realm is my motto.”  
  
“Queen,” Jasmine clarified “You talk like a Queen yourself.”  
  
“I was… once, or twice.”  
  
“What happened?”  
  
“Long story,” said Regina as they were making their way into town. Both of their heads covered against the heat, and to avoid Jafar or one of his minions recognizing the Queen “but I am the mayor of Storybrooke, which is almost like being a Queen.”  
  
“Good,” Jasmine smiled, and led her where she thought they could be checking the whereabouts of her Savior as first stop.  
  
They walked a long while before they reached the market. As they did so, they talked quite a bit about their respective lives. Regina also asked a lot of questions about things she had seen in the movie. She asked about Abu, the Genie, and the magic carpet. When Jasmine had told her that Abu and the magic carpet where wherever Aladdin was at the moment, and that the Genie had been freed a long time ago, she had to stop herself from making a comment about Robin Williams. Henry (both as a kid and now) and Emma  since she had moved in, had a particular fixation with Disney movies. They would watch them whenever they could, and Aladdin had been one of their favorites. They were still crying for the loss of the actor playing the Genie almost a year after he had passed away.  
  
They had inevitably ended up talking about Henry and Emma more. Regina wasn’t sure why she had been so open with the other Queen. Not that she had disclosed any particular private detail, of course; she still had told her more about her life in general than she usually would have with someone who was basically a stranger.  
  
  
Minutes after they arrived at the market, Aladdin came flying down toward them. He stepped off the magic carpet and hugged his Queen.  
  
“Jasmine,” he said as he did so “you are okay.”  
  
“What happened?” she asked, returning the embrace.  
  
“Jafar,” he replied letting go of the hug, looking at Regina with curiosity “I have sensed his magic coming from not too far away from the castle. I thought… I thought he was doing something to you.”  
  
Knowing that, Jasmine leaned forward and hugged him again; tighter this time.  
  
“Emma,” Regina almost whispered to herself.  
  
“You think he got her?” Jasmine asked her.  
  
“I am afraid so. You said Jafar can track magic, right? Emma might have tried using hers to find me.”  
  
“Who are you anyway?” asked Aladdin. Abu on his shoulder looking at her with suspicion.  
  
“There is no time to explain,” urged Jasmine “you two need to get there right now. You both have magic. Take the carpet, it can come get me as soon as you are dropped off.”  
  
Aladdin nodded, as Abu jumped off him and into Jasmine’s shoulder. The magic carpet had already turned itself into an half staircase to facilitate the new person with getting on it. Aladdin still got on the carpet first, then helped Regina on. The moment she was securely on it as well, the carpet started flying away guided by Aladdin’s instructions.

 

* * *

 

  
  
“What’s your name?” he asked after they stepped off the carpet, and it was flying back to get to Jasmine “In case I need to -“  
  
He was cut off by Emma’s voice screaming Regina’s name.  
  
“Don’t listen to it,” he told her as he stepped in front of her “that’s one of Jafar’s tricks.”  
  
Regina shook her head and looked at him. She was almost ready to jump into action and follow the voice wherever it would have taken her.  
  
“That’s your name, right? Regina?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Okay, Regina,” he said with a shy smile “Jafar’s magic is, well, it is very particular. You need to follow my instructions to find this Emma you were talking about. Can you do that?”  
  
Regina nodded. There was no other choice.  
  
“As I understand you have magic too?” He got another nod from Regina “can you call it within yourself without using it?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Good. Now close your eyes and do that, focusing on your Emma.”  
  
Regina did exactly as she was told. Moments later she opened her eyes again, Aladdin was at her side now; in front of her there was a big wall with several doors. A wall that hadn’t been there when she had closed her eyes.  
  
“Excellent,” Aladdin smiled “you did that.”  
  
“How do I know which door to use?”  
  
“Follow your heart. It usually knows.”  
  
And Regina knew too. Her heart had been guiding her toward Emma whenever she needed it to. Whenever the other woman was in danger, her heart seemed to always sense it. She closed her eyes and listened to the beating of her heart. She didn’t want to waste time, part of her wanted to just run into every door until she found her girlfriend. She knew, though, that that wasn’t a real possibility; choosing the wrong door might as well bring Emma or them to their deaths.  
  
The next time she opened her eyes, one of the doors was glowing red. She stopped then, her heart beating faster and faster. She took a deep breath, and the door stopped glowing. As her heart started beating at a normal pace, another door started glowing a light yellow. She knew then that the second one was the right door.  
  
Just as she was about to open it, Jasmine came flying toward them.  
  
“Wow,” she said at the glowing door and the wall materialized out of nowhere “that’s where she is?”  
  
“I believe so.”  
  
“Do you want us to come with you?” Jasmine asked, placing a hand on Regina’s shoulder. She had a feeling she could take over Jafar’s strong dark magic, but she had to ask to be sure.  
  
“I think it’s better if you wait here,” she replied, ready to push the door open “I’ll send a signal if I need any help.”  
  
“Take the carpet with you,” said Aladdin.

 

* * *

  
  
She nodded, pushed the door open, and started walking in the dark corridor in front of her, the magic carpet flying low at her side.  
  
At the end of the dark corridor, she found herself at the beginning of a maze. Emma’s voice calling for her coming from every direction. The moment she thought she could get on the carpet and fly over it, a roof made of leaves and branches covered the whole thing making it impossible for her to do so. Jafar must have been aware of her presence there by now. She had no other choice than to keep following her heart. She had no intention of giving away her exact position.  
  
Several turns and false starts later, she found herself at a dead end, and Emma was at the far end of it. Of course, as soon as had tried to step closer, Jafar had appeared between them, his back to her.  
  
“Well, well, well,” he said before even turning around “look who we have h- and who are you supposed to be?”  
  
He promptly directed a blast of magic in her direction, only to be stopped by Regina’s raising her hand and directing it at her right. There was now a huge hole in one of the maze’s walls. ‘Good to know,’ she thought to herself.  
  
“Someone who has no time for your little tricks,” she said instead.  
  
“You want tricks?” he asked, his eyes dark, while moving to the side and revealing Emma still behind him. In a instant she was placed into a huge hourglass. That must be his go to weapon even here.  
  
The next blast of his magic caught her by surprise: she fell backward only to be caught in time by the magic carpet. Jafar was already disappearing, leaving behind only the echo of his evil laughter. He wasn’t after either of the two women, after all. They were only collateral damage.  
  
Thanks to the magic carpet, she didn’t take as long to regain conscience as if she had hit the ground with her head. She had still be knocked out long enough.   
  
Long enough for Emma’s legs to be completely covered in sand. As soon as the send touched her body, it turned it into stone. She was now literally stuck in place, with half her body petrified.  
  
Regina tried to run to her; but the more she ran, the more the distance between them increased. She threw fireballs at the roof of the maze, making a big enough hole for her to pass through it and out in the open. She then easily jumped on the magic carpet and flew up. She reached the dead end from above, and did the same thing. Fireballs at the roof, then she dove right back in. Her quick thinking had been very useful: she was now in front of the hourglass; Emma covered by sand at the waist.  
  
“Regina,” she whispered.  
  
“Close your eyes,” Regina told her, before starting to throw fireballs at the glass.  
  
“Can you use your magic?” she asked when it seemed like by the time it took her to break it with her fireballs, Emma would have been completely covered.  
  
“I think so,” she replied, she had kept her arms lifted up as much as possible the moment she had realized what was happening to her.  
  
“Use it in the same direction I am,” Regina instructed her, before she started aiming her magic at a spot on the hourglass.  
  
Emma followed her lead, careful not to touch the sand with her hands. After a few minutes, in which Emma’s elbows had started to turn into stone, their magic started combining through the glass in a mix of yellow and red. A moment later, it combined completely and the whole hourglass turned into sand, falling all around them. Emma fell with it, having lost the feeling of her legs.  
  
“Emma!” She knelt next to her, and cupped her face in her hands.  
  
Emma opened her eyes and widened them. “I thought I was having a mirage earlier. That’s really what you are wearing? And that… that was…?”  
  
“Yes,” she smiled softly, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear.  
  
“That’s when you are supposed to kiss me, isn’t it?”  
  
“Usually, I’d say yes, but,” she got up and extended her hand to her “there is something we need to do first. There is no time for explanations.”  
  
And so they sat on the magic carpet waiting for them, and flew out of one of the opening in the maze. They flew around for a bit until Regina recognized the door she had come through. The carpet did as well, because it was already flying lower to reach it before Regina could give it any instructions. A confused Emma next to her watched in awe at everything around them.  
  
They heard Jafar’s laughter coming from behind the door before they even opened it. This time there wasn’t any more sign of awe on Emma’s face.  
  
Without setting foot on the ground, Regina used one of her fireballs to get rid of the door. They soon flew out of the maze, and the wall had disappeared already behind them.  
What they found in front of them, though, was a darkened sky. Jasmine and Aladdin sinking down in quicksand, Jafar manically laughing ten feet or so behind them. Aladdin was trying to both use his magic on him and trying not to move to much in order to not speed the sinking down process any further.  
  
“Focus on getting out of there,” Regina told him when they were flying close enough.   
  
He nodded his head and directed his magic at his and Jasmine’s feet; while Emma and Regina directed their magic at the villain.  
  
At first Jafar didn’t even bother fighting back, he had a thick protection spell all around himself. When he realized how powerful their combined magic was and how quickly it was breaking through the protection, he started aiming his magic at them. This, and Aladdin’s efforts, made the quicksand stop.  
  
Too caught up with the two on the magic carpet, Jafar didn’t notice Aladdin and Jasmine approaching him from one side. In a second, Aladdin was attacking him as well. It was three against one, but there was still something missing to defeat the villain once and for all.  
  
“Place a hand on his arm,” Emma yelled toward Jasmine on a whim, remembering how the same gesture had jumpstarted Regina’s magic all those years before.  
  
Jasmine did so, and Aladdin’s magic grew stronger immediately. Now, Jafar’s magic was no match for their combined magic. In no time, they managed to knock him down completely. Without waiting a single second longer, Aladdin made strong enchanted cuffs appear on his wrists. As soon as he did so, he fell unconscious on the ground as well.  
  
Jasmine knelt next to him, placing a kiss on his lips that triggered the True Love magic. It wasn’t the first time they had shared one in the ten years they had known each other.  
  
The two couples met halfway in front of the unconscious villain.  
  
“Thank you,” Jasmine told the other two women “and thank you for the hint, Emma.”  
  
“My pleasure, J-Jasmine,” Emma blushed slightly and brought a hand to the back of her neck.  
  
“Right,” said Regina noticing her girlfriend’s behavior “I almost forgot about it.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Every time we watch your movie, this one,” Regina tilted her head toward Emma “always says she wanted to marry you. Or at least your character in the movie.”  
  
“What’s a movie?” asked Aladdin puzzled.  
  
“I’ll explain later,” Jasmine said looking at him, then she looked at Emma again “I am very flattered, but as you can see… I have already married my own Savior.”  
  
She tilted her head toward her husband, and he mimicked Emma’s previous gesture: a blush on his face, and a hand at the back of his head. Regina and Jasmine looked at one another and exchanged a knowing eye roll.  
  
“And I have my own Queen now.” Emma took Regina’s hand in hers while saying that.  
  
Regina smiled at her, then said: “I think it’s time for us to go. Will you be okay with him over there?”  
  
“Absolutely. Now we have a whole new weapon in our arsenal. Thanks to Emma,” said Jasmine, winking at her in the process, liking the way she knew it would make her blush even more.  
  
“Well, this is goodbye then.”  
  
“Come back to visit us if you can,” Jasmine told them, Aladdin nodded.  
  
“Sure. If we can.”  
  
Regina then turned around to face Emma.  
  
“How are you going to leave now?”  
  
“Magic,” replied Regina with a smile, before getting on her tiptoes and kissing Emma on the lips.  
  



	12. Chapter 12

The landing back home was as soft as the landing in Agrabah had been, softer even; at least for Regina. Emma reappeared right on the chase lounge with Regina straddling her lap again.  
  
“You okay?” she asked the woman on top of her.  
  
“I should probably ask you that,” replied Regina “are you hurt?”  
  
“Nope.”  
  
Regina nodded, and then they both instinctively extended a hand in front of themselves and made their own cellphone appear on it. Henry was indeed at a school trip when they had left, they had no idea where he was in that moment or how long it had been since their disappearance.  
  
“Moms, we got home earlier than anticipated,” started reading Regina on her phone.  
  
“I’m sleeping at the loft for tonight. See you tomorrow,” Emma finished reading on her own.  
  
“He sure does like his group messages.”  
  
“Yeap,” agreed Emma “wait, I have a couple of voicemails from dad.”  
  
She pushed the ‘speaker’ button under the first new message before she played it. Charming’s voice came from it: “Hey Emma, it’s your dad. Did the beep come from my phone or from Neal’s toy? Anyway, I’m not sure if you got Henry’s text earlier. Your mom and him got back earlier from the trip. I will…” The message ended there. She repeated the same steps for the second voicemail. “I will be bringing him back home later tomorrow morning. Give me a call when you hear this. Bye.”  
  
Both Regina and Emma laughed at that last part: he had talked extremely fast in the second one, too afraid the message was going to caught off once more. Then they exchanged a look and Emma pressed the call button, still on speaker.  
  
“Hello?”  
  
“Hey, dad. I just got your message.”  
  
“Emma! We tried calling Regina’s phone and on the home phone, but got no answer there either.”  
  
“There is no message on my phone.”  
  
“Oh, hey Regina,” Charming said a bit awkwardly “we didn’t leave a message to you because we didn’t want to bombard you two.”  
  
“I have no missed calls either,” she pointed out, still looking down at her own phone.  
  
“Henry,” he said, his voice muffled by his hand on the receiver “I thought you called your mom as well.”  
  
“Yeah. I called mom at home. That’s what I meant,” came Henry’s equally muffled voice.  
  
“He says…”  
“We heard him,” replied both Emma and Regina at the same time.  
  
“Where were you anyway?”  
  
“We had another one of those… hum…” started Emma “dad, I’ll explain tomorrow, okay?”  
  
“Okay. I’ll be there around 11 am. Is that okay?”  
  
“Perfect,” said Regina.  
  
“I’ll see you tomorrow then.”  
  
“Let me talk to them,” came Henry’s voice from the other side.  
  
“Moms,” he exclaimed moments later a bit too enthusiastically.  
  
“Kid!”  
  
“Sweetheart, your voice.”  
  
“Sorry, mom.” he said, lowering his voice considerably “it happened again, didn’t it?”  
  
“Yes. We will tell you all about it tomorrow.”  
  
“Can I at least get a sneak peek? Where did you go?”  
  
Emma and Regina exchanged a look, when Regina nodded.  
  
“Kid, we got to Agrabah.” Now her excited voice matched his.  
  
“You did?? I can’t wait to hear all about it in the morning.”  
  
“We did!”  
  
“Sweetheart?”  
  
“Yes, mom?”  
  
“Did you have a safe trip?”  
  
“Yes. I will tell you about it tomorrow as well.” He almost imitated her own tone of voice, then decided not to.  
  
“Good,” Regina smiled at that.  
  
“Grandpa is waiting to use his phone, he was playing some game or another. See you tomorrow. Love you moms.”  
  
“We love you too.” Regina replied for the both of them, then waited for him to hang up on the other side. She then looked up and into Emma’s smiling face.  
  
“What?”  
  
“I love the way you love our son,” she replied, wrapping her arms around her waist.  
Regina had ended up holding Emma’s phone as well in the middle of the phone call. She magicked both of their phones away now, and wrapped her own arms loosely around Emma’s neck. She then leaned forward to plant a soft kiss on her lips.  
  
“Where were we?” asked Emma after the kiss.  
  
“I think you were about to remove the little I had on before.”  
  
Emma looked her up and down now, and bit her lower lip.  
  
“What?”  
  
“I’m not sure I want to remove your clothes just yet this time.” Emma brought her hands to her exposed midriff.  
  
“Your nerd is starting to show, Emma Swan.” Regina smirked.  
  
“You have been rubbing off on me, I’m sure.”  
  
“I think you had all of it in you already.”  
  
“Wanna see if the rubbing off part has any part of it anyway?” Emma winked.  
  
Regina grinned before leaning forward again and kissing her more passionately. They kept kissing for a long period of time, laying down on the chaise lounge under them first; Regina still straddling Emma’s hips. They made love all throughout the evening and into the night, only stopping a few times here and there to get food and water or to take a quick nap. They made love almost everywhere in the huge mansion. Only late into the night, at around 2 am, they decided to stop and go to sleep in their own bed.  


* * *

 

  
That’s where they woke up the next morning: spooning completely naked under the covers. It was the beginning of June, so it wasn’t that cold. Emma had still pulled the covers over their bodies somewhere in the middle of the night.  
  
Regina woke up first, her head on Emma’s shoulder and her arm tightly wrapped around her body. Emma was sleeping soundly in her arms. She had no intention of waking her up, so she waited, enjoying the feeling of being so close to each other.  
  
“Good morning,” she said, when Emma had started stirring in her arms half an hour later, and had ultimately turned around to face her.  
  
“Morning,” she mumbled back “have you been awake long?”  
  
“Not that long,” she smiled at Emma’s still sleepy voice, then she brought her hand up to cup her face “How did you sleep?”  
  
“Perfect.” She smiled back. “You?”  
  
“Great.”  
  
“What’s wrong?” Emma reached for Regina’s hand still on her cheek and brought it between their bodies to intertwine their fingers together.  
  
“As nice as it was meeting some of your favorite cartoon characters yesterday, I…”  
  
“I know. I feel the same. But we will figure it out, Regina.” She brought her hand up and kissed her knuckles “We will, I promise.”  
  
Regina nodded before she let go of her hand and turned around giving her her back. Emma got the hint: she scooted over and wrapped her arms around her. She then kissed her on the shoulder. “I promise,” she repeated.  


* * *

 

  
  
“You should have seen it, kid,” Emma was saying later that day “your mom came flying down on the magic carpet to rescue me. She even had Jasmine’s clothes on.”  
  
“Why were you wearing her clothes?” their son asked with a tilt of his head.  
  
“To… uhm…” Regina started “to blend in better.”  
  
“Oh okay.” He was hoping for a more adventure-like reason “How is it flying on the magic carpet anyway?”  
  
“Awesome. Except for the flying toward an evil villain that most likely doesn’t care if you live or die part.”  
  
“Uh-huh,” agreed Regina “I didn’t really focus on the fun side of the situation whenever I was on it.”  
  
“How many times did you fly on it?”  
  
“Three in total,” she furrowed her brows recalling each of them “yes, three: with Aladdin to go find your mom; alone when I was trying to rescue her; and the last time when we both went to help Jasmine and Aladdin against Jafar.”  
  
“Were their lives like they are in the movie?”  
  
Charming had brought him home at around eleven as he had told them. He had asked a few questions on what had happened to them the day before, but he hadn’t gotten too much into it. He just cared that his daughter and the other mother of his grandson were okay. Henry, on the other hand, was always full of questions.  
  
“Not completely.” Regina was the one answering him now “they were already married. Well, not already… ten years have passed since they have met. They have trapped Jafar once all those years ago, but he was ultimately able to get himself free again. He was still the villain of their story.”  
  
“Hopefully they will be able to get rid of him once and for all now,” finished Emma.  
  
“Wow. Ten years?!”  
  
Both his moms nodded.  
  
“Have you found out anything else about the reason why you keep being transported in all these different realms?”  
  
“Besides what we already knew,” answered Regina “this time we learned that we won’t be transported back home if it is someone else that shares a True Love kiss.”  
  
“Jasmine and Aladdin shared a True Love kiss?”  
  
“Yeap.”  
  
“Cool.”  
  
“Speaking of which, Henry,” Regina started, thinking back at the conversation had with Jasmine “have you noticed if any of this is being written in the storybook?”  
  
“Or any of the other storybooks, for what it matters?” she added immediately.  
  
“I didn’t.” He raised his eyebrows, he hadn’t thought about it before. “I haven’t open one of those books since I broke my author’s pen. I should check it out.”  
  
He quickly stood up from his place on the couch, and sprinted up the stairs to grab his storybook from his room. He came sprinting back two minutes later.  
  
“Nope,” he said after he had flipped through the whole half of the book a couple of times to be sure he hadn’t missed anything.  
  
“You sure?” asked Emma.  
  
“Of course I am sure.” He rolled his eyes, but flipped through the pages once more.  
  
“What is the last thing written on it?” asked Regina instead.  
  
“Uhmm, let me see,” he flipped to the last filled page “that’s weird.”  
  
“What’s weird?” asked both Emma and Regina at the same time.  
  
“The last thing on here is ma taking in the darkness. More precisely: the dagger with her name on it in the middle of Main Street.”  
  
“That is weird indeed,” agreed Regina.  
  
“You know what though?” he said a few seconds after, closing the book shut in his lap.  
  
“What, sweetheart?”  
  
“It’s not fair you two get to have all those adventures on your own.”  
  
“I wouldn’t call them adventures. We didn’t really choose to go to any of those places.”  
  
“Yes, I know. But…” he started half pouting.  
  
Regina got up from her place on the other couch, knelt in front of him and made him look her in the eye.  
  
“I know, sweetheart,” she told him in her sweetest voice, placing a hand on his cheek.  
  
She then got up again. As she did so, Henry got up as well and wrapped his arms around her in a tight hug. Regina placed a kiss on his head, and held him close to her.  
  
“Must you be so cheesy?”  
  
“You are only saying that because you are jealous we are not hugging you too,” said Henry.  
  
“Hell yeah I am.” Emma crossed her arms with a fake pout.  
  
“Come here, you big dork,” told her Regina.  
  
Emma immediately jumped on her feet, and threw her arms around the other two who where still hugging.  
  
“You guys are weird.”  
  
“No more than usual,” pointed out Emma.  
  
“That’s true,” he said laughing, already having forgotten the reason why he had been upset only moments before.  


* * *

  
  
  
A Friday night weeks later, they were once again all three seated at the kitchen table. They were deciding what to get as take out for that night. It was as if they spent half of their time deciding what to eat next; not that any of them complained much about that, they all liked the food just the same as the other. Even though Regina would point out that her palate was surely more refined than the one of her girlfriend or their son.  
  
“Look,” Henry exclaimed all of a sudden, turning his phone toward them “you guys can now get married in all the States.”  
  
Emma grabbed the phone from his hand, getting an annoyed expression in return, and read from it: “Same-sex marriage legalized by Supreme Court.”  
  
“Oh!” she added, blushing slightly “that’s good.”  
  
“Tsk,” Regina said instead “same-sex marriage, or marriage as I call it, has been legal in Storybrooke since it was created in 1983.”  
  
“Wow, ma,” Henry said “your birth brought the gay here.”  
  
“I am pretty sure your mom brought it here, and made it legal. Apparently.”  
  
“Says the one that was locked in a closet and came out on the other side with a blast of rainbow.”  
  
“Oh my god,” Henry started laughing “blast of rainbow sounds like one of those ‘create your porn-star name’ or something like that.”  
  
“Porn-star name?” Regina asked him, squinting her eyes.  
  
“Yeah.” He was still laughing “Yours would be… magic of unicorn.”  
  
“Wait, no,” said Emma instead “your mom’s name would be… uhmm… ‘apples and unicorns.’ No, ‘unicorns and apples.’ Yes, that’s it.”  
  
At that, Henry started laughing even harder, causing Emma to start laughing as well.  
  
Regina brought a hand to her forehead, and shook her head in resignation. She knew that when they both started laughing like that, they needed more than a couple of minutes to fully calm themselves down. She also smiled to herself: she was obviously happy for the news; but she was mostly glad because she knew how important it was for Emma since she had lived in the States all of her life. And for Henry as well, for the prospect of their son growing up and living in a better world than her mother grew up in.  


* * *

  
  
  
Not even a week later, Emma was sitting at her desk in her office. It was lunch time already, but she had been unable to get up. On one hand, she was starving; on the other, the room was the perfect temperature thanks to the central AC system. Convincing herself that she was still deciding whether to call Granny’s to have a grilled cheese and some french fries delivered directly to her in her office or go to Regina’s office and see if she could take her lunch break with her, she grabbed her phone and started scrolling through her Instagram.  
  
She started by looking through the most recent posts, then decided to go to Storybrooke’s official account; account she had only learned recently was managed by Regina herself. She was curious to see what were the last pictures posted from the last couple of days of the previous month. Even tough, as Regina had told them, same-sex marriage had been always legal in town, its citizens had taken upon themselves to join the rest of the country in the celebration.  
  
She scrolled through a picture of a huge pride flag outside Granny’s, and a picture of Granny herself with a bi pride pin on her shirt. Emma wasn’t sure if it was for herself or as a sign of pride for her granddaughter; it didn’t really matter which one of the two options it was.  
There were several new pics of herself and Regina posted on it; all of them with different rainbow filter on them, all of them taken and edited by Henry. He had also made a few posts of them individually: Regina with the bi flag colors, Emma with the lesbian flag ones. She felt a bit awkward looking at that, she hadn’t even realized that the kid had taken so many pictures of them when they weren’t looking.  
  
There was a picture of Henry himself with a tiny pansexual flag painted on his cheek, he was smiling and making the peace sign at the camera. A post of a collage of Charming made her stop in her tracks a bit longer; she squinted at the pictures, then understood what he had done: in the first one he was wearing a pink shirt, the second one a lavender shirt, and finally in the third one a blue shirt. There was a group photo of all the dwarfs hugging under an asexual flag; Grumpy was, of course, pouting in a far end corner of it.  
  
  
The second to last new post on the town’s account since she had last visited it was one with a collage of pictures of August and his new boyfriend Marcus. Then, last but not least, a picture of the Town Hall painted in rainbow colors; picture she was sure Regina had taken herself.  
  
  
She smiled looking at all the different kind of ways all of them had decided to celebrate the occasion. Since it had been the first time since she had set foot in town that they hadn’t been under attack or away in another realm during the month of June, she had noticed that the whole town had also participated in pride month in their own way.  
  
Going back to the main page of her Instagram, she started scrolling down through all other kind of different posts. She was too comfortable in the cool air to get up. But also too lazy to get out of the app and call Granny’s. She kept going back and forth between videos of food (which made her even hungrier) and other random stuff. The moment she stopped to look at one of the random ones, she started getting enveloped by the usual white light. She quickly jumped off the chair in an attempt to see if there was a way to prevent it from happening. She was more aware of the approaching light coming to take her away more than she had ever been in the past occasions. She didn’t succeed in her attempt though. Her phone fell down from her hand and into her desk with a thud, as she was disappearing into thin air to who knows where.  



	13. Chapter 13

Regina was glad that this time she was fully clothed when she had been poofed away; after all, she had been at her office when it had happened. She was even happier for the fact that she had landed on her feet instead of having found herself stuck somewhere or another. She was not so glad for the fact that, wherever she was, it was raining. The rain was light, but still a bit annoying. She looked at a puddle right in front of her, when she heard footsteps coming from her left. She didn’t even have time to turn around and check who it was, that…  
  
“[The rain made her reflect, for the puddles provided a mirror that magnified the sunshine of her soul](https://www.instagram.com/p/BfjEl0wjIqm/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=9c6ya4k7v1xw),*” Emma said in a serious voice.  
  
She turned around completely at that, and looked at her girlfriend coming her way. ‘Shit, she must not remember who I am,’ she thought to herself.  
  
“Okay,” she said out loud “I am going to try to make this one quick. You and I know each other. In fact, we are together.”  
  
“Are we now?” asked Emma with a smirk.  
  
“Emma?”  
  
“Who is this Emma you are asking of?” She tried to repress laughter, but with no apparent result.  
  
“You know who I am?”  
  
“Of course I know who you are.”  
  
“What was that whole thing about then?”  
  
“I was scrolling through Instagram, and it was the last thing I saw before I… well, we got poofed away.”  
  
They were a mere foot apart now, so they moved even closer. They wrapped their arms around the other and kissed.  
  
“What the hell?” exclaimed Regina.  
  
“Why are we still here?” asked Emma.  
  
Still into each other’s arms, their lips met again for another kiss. Another attempt at a True Love kiss that would bring them back home.  
  
“Did you make this happen?” asked Regina at the second fail attempt.  
  
“No,” Emma exclaimed offended, then she added: “Well, I don’t think so?”

“Were you thinking about something like this?” Regina gestured toward their surroundings: they were somewhere it was clearly winter. It was raining and almost everything was covered by either puddles, snow, or ice.  
  
“Thinking of somewhere cool in the middle of summer?” she asked with a chuckle “Of course I was. Did I make this happen on purpose? Of course not.”  
“Okay, smart-ass. Why didn’t our kisses bring us back home?”  
  
“Maybe this time we need something else.”  
  
And just as Emma was uttering those words, something was occurring to Regina.  
  
“Henry,” they both said at the same time.  
  
Both at the same time they jumped into action: Regina trying to make something belonging to him appear in her outstretched hand; Emma trying to see if she could poof herself, preferably both of them, where he was. Neither of them succeeded.  
  
“What do we do?” Regina asked in an usual desperate tone.  
  
Emma placed both her hands on her shoulders and squeezed lightly, looking her in the eye. “Now we… we split up.”  
  
She moved backward and tried to use her magic: she threw a tiny firework in the air. Not too high in case someone else would see it.  
  
“Does your magic work?” she asked “see if you can do something like this as well.”  
  
Regina nodded, moved a few steps backwards herself and used her magic. Instead of fireworks, she produced a tiny flame in her hand, which she made jump up in the air as well.  
  
“You’ll have to teach me that when we get home,” Emma said in awe, then her face went back to being serious “Okay. Whoever finds something or someone first, will signal the other with one of those. Bigger, of course.”  
  
“And then,” she continued, flicking her hand in front of her disappearing from her spot and appearing next to Regina to prove what she was about to say “we poof wherever the other is.”  
  
Regina brought a hand to her stomach and nodded.  
  
“You are okay being on your own, are you?”  
  
“Yes,” she answered firmly “we must find Henry as soon as possible. This is the fastest way.”  
  
“Just checking,” Emma said softly.  
  
“I know.”  
  
“So, which way do you want to go?”  
  
“I’ll take East, you take West?” said Regina, gesturing toward each direction.  
  
Emma nodded. She then took Regina’s hand in hers, squeezing it lightly and letting it go right away, before she walked toward West.

 

* * *

  
  
Twenty minutes of walking in the middle of nowhere, being extra careful not to slip and fall on the occasional thicker ice on the ground, Emma crossed path with someone she knew: Elsa. She was walking hand in hand with another woman. She should have thought about her considering the scenery.  
  
“Emma,” she exclaimed when she saw her, coming running toward her to envelop her in a hug.  
  
“Elsa,” she said back, returning the hug “Is this your realm?”  
  
“Yes. This is Arendelle,” she said, letting go of the hug “what are you doing here?”  
  
“It’s a long story. Right now, I need to find Henry.”  
  
“That’s weird,” Elsa said, exchanging a look with the woman standing next to her “Anna just disappeared out of nowhere. We were talking and … poof, gone. Same thing happened to her brother Adri. One moment they were together, the next he was gone.”  
  
“This is Agni, by the way,” she added.  
  
“Nice to meet you.” Emma smiled.  
  
“Nice to meet you, too.”  
  
“Have you two tried tracking them down?”  
  
“Yes,” Agni replied “our magic doesn’t seem to be working properly right now.”  
  
“We even tried sharing a True Love kiss,” Elsa added, her cheeks turning pinkish “it has worked other times, but today… no luck.”  
  
“Oh,” Emma said, looking from one to the other and face-palmed herself in her head “I must warn Regina.”  
  
She raised her hand and threw a firework in the air: this time it was very big and bright. And it flew several feet above their head. Two seconds later, Regina appeared at her side.  
  
“Oh! I see you have found your sparkly, blue dressed friend and her sparkly, red dressed girlfriend.” Regina got even snappier when she was worried about something, and suspecting that Henry was in danger was the number one thing that made her the most worried.  
  
“How do you know?” Emma turned around to face her, her mouth open in surprise.  
  
“Not everyone is as oblivious as you are, Miss Swan.”  
  
“Awww,” said Elsa looking at them interact “you are still at those formalities. When I was in Storybrooke I was hoping…”  
  
“What?!?”  
  
“Well, I was hoping you would realize just how good you two would be together.”  
  
“We… uhm… we actually…” Emma started mumbling, scratching a spot on her left cheek.  
  
“What she is trying to tell you in her own mumbling way is that we are together.”  
  
“You are?!” Elsa smiled widely, then turned around to face her girlfriend “Didn’t I tell you they were perfect for each other?”  
  
“She told me at least half a dozen times,” Agni told them.  
  
“Did you make me come here to gossip or…?” asked Regina.  
  
“Yeah, sorry. Anna and Agni’s brother have disappeared as well. Maybe they are were Henry is.”  
  
“Do you have any idea where they could be?”  
  
“I have a suspicion, but we won’t know until we get there.”  
  
“Lead the way then,” Regina said “and I apologize for snapping like that before, I am just worried about our son.”  
  
“No worries,” told her Agni with an understanding smile “I am as worried about my brother as you are.”  
  
That being said, both Elsa and Agni turned around and started walking. They started holding hands again: Emma hadn’t noticed as she had met before, but just above their conjoined hands there were tiny clouds and some fog.  
  
“How did you not realize they were a couple?” Regina asked, as they were walking behind them.  
  
“I… was too busy being worried about our son.” Emma stuck her tongue out at her.  
  
“Come on,” she said, reached for her hand “let’s go find our son.”  
  
Emma took her hand in hers and said: “And kill whoever gets in our way.”  
  
“That’s the spirit.” Regina grinned.

* * *

  
  
“This is a first, isn’t it?” said Emma some time later.  
  
“Uh?” Regina asked, just then getting out of her own head.  
  
Emma repeated what she had just said.  
  
“What is?”  
  
“This here. Us not being separated for once.”  
  
“Unless you don’t count that time with no memories.”  
  
“Yeah, well… we weren’t holding hands there.”  
  
“You are right,” Regina agreed with a short nod, then she looked ahead again and furrowed her eyebrows.  
  
“By the way,” continued Emma, trying to distract her girlfriend from wherever she was going into her head at the moment. Not that she wasn’t worried about Henry as well. She was terrified, but at least one of them had to keep a clean mind from dangerous thoughts “good job with all the pride posts on the town’s Instagram page. I know you have done it mostly because of same-sex marriage being legalized in the States.”  
  
“It wasn’t legal before?” asked Elsa, looking over her shoulder with a surprised expression “sorry for eavesdropping.”  
  
“That’s okay,” told her Emma with a smile, still keeping an eye on Regina “to answer your question: no, it wasn’t legal before. Not in all of them anyway. Is it here?”  
  
“I am the Queen of Arendelle, and I can marry whoever I want,” Elsa blushed slightly saying that and looking at her girlfriend, then looked over her shoulder again “why should I deny that to anyone else living in my realm?”  
  
“Fair enough.” Emma nodded “Isn’t it, Regina? Kinda like you did with Storybrooke.”  
  
“Yes, it is fair,” Regina replied distractedly.  
  
“How did you two meet, anyway?” Emma caught herself asking. She wasn’t sure if she was trying to distract Regina or herself more; both worked fine by her, if she was able to do so.  
  
“Anna introduced us. Actually… she threw this big party for my last birthday and invited a few of the nearby realms’ princesses and Queens. Without me knowing, of course.”  
  
“You met on your birthday then?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Regina and I met on my birthday,” Emma was smiling at the memory.  
  
“There were a lot of people at the party, but when my eyes set on Agni… I knew I didn’t want to meet anyone for the rest of the night.”  
  
“Then she shut herself in the room for the rest of the night, she means.”  
  
“That part is not romantic when you are telling it to someone else,” protested Elsa.  
  
“I didn’t mention the part where you mumbled a low ‘hi’ before disappearing into your room.”  
  
“Now you have.”  
  
“Well… but you did come downstairs again before the end of the party to ask me if we could meet again. I can give you that.”  
  
“Did she act all awkward every time you two got too close?” asked Regina, who was following the story closely, even though her eyes were still focused on their surroundings.  
  
“Who told you that?” Elsa’s face got almost bright red.  
  
“No one. Just a guess from experience,” she tilted her head toward Emma at her side.  
  
“Hey!”  
“How long did it take you to stop being jumpy whenever I dared getting too close or tried to touch you in a friendly and comforting way?”  
  
Emma brought her hand to the back of her head and scratched a spot there. “Too long. Happy now?”  
  
“Very,” Regina looked at her and grinned.  
  
  
“Shhhh,” said Agni all of a sudden.  
  
Both Emma and Regina stiffed at that, and looked toward where she was pointing: in front of them, up on a small mountain covered in snow, was an ice castle.  
  
All for of them stopped to listen closely in order to figure out if anyone was there as Elsa and Agni had suspected. When they didn’t hear anything from still that far away, they started whispering.  
  
“I think it is safe to poof ourself up there,” said Elsa, pointing at the castle’s entrance “but I must warn you: I don’t know what we will find there once we get inside.”  
  
“I think it is better if we split once we get pass the first door: Elsa and I will go looking for our siblings, you go looking for your boy. If there is any kind of danger, you send out one of those signals you sent out before. We’ll do the same.”  
  
  
They all jumped into action at the same time, poofing themselves up on the mountain and in front of the huge ice castle. When they were able to push the door open thanks to their combined efforts, they were met by an empty entryway. Everything in it had been frozen and the air was still. Something didn’t feel right. They silently nodded at one another, and proceeded into the next room. There was no other option at that point.  
  
The next room, a huge ballroom now completely covered in ice as well, at first glance seemed empty. Only after carefully sifting through every corner of it, they heard a low voice coming from one of the chests lining one of the walls.  
  
“It’s Anna,” Elsa exclaimed after listening to it carefully. She automatically took Agni’s hand in hers and they both directed their magic toward the chest.  
  
After a few minutes, all the ice surrounding it finally melted. Elsa ran toward in to throw it open: inside was her sister curled up in a corner, shivering. She helped her up and hugged her immediately.  
  
Letting go of the hug and finally stepping out of the chest, Anna looked at her sister’s girlfriend. “Agni, I am sorry. I tried to stop them from getting Adri, but…” tears started falling down her cheeks immediately.  
  
“Where is he now?”  
  
“I am not sure. We were both here when they separated us and locked me in here.”  
  
Clenching her jaw tight, Agni nodded.  
  
“Have you seen Henry?” asked Emma, now reaching their side of the ballroom with Regina at her side. They were hoping to find someone else hidden somewhere just as Anna had been.  
  
“Emma! R- The… Queen… what are you doing here?”  
  
“Long story,” replied both Regina and Elsa at the same time.  
  
Elsa then magicked a heavy jacket that she wrapped around her sister’s shoulders. “We need to go find Adri and Henry. You stay here, okay?”  
  
Anna agreed, wrapping the item of clothing even tighter around herself. “Be careful.”

As previously agreed, they split: Agni and Elsa walking through the door at their right, Emma and Regina walking through the one at their left.

 

* * *

 

  
Inside the first room, they came face to face with an ice monster. A smaller version of the one they had to defeat in Storybrooke a couple of years before. With their combined magic, it didn’t take them long to melt it down to the ground. Of course it hadn’t stopped there: the deeper they got into the castle, the bigger the ice monster they encountered got. After five or six rooms, they found themselves in front of the biggest door yet at the same time as Elsa and Agni did.  
  
“Found anything?” asked Emma.  
  
“No. You?”  
  
Emma shook her head no. “Ready?” she said, looking at Regina. Regina nodded in her direction, before they started once again to direct their magic toward the ice door.  
  
Realizing that, just as with the very first door, they needed to combine all four’s magic together to break through it, the other two women joined them. They soon found themselves face to face with another ice monster. As face to face you can get with a monster at least twelve feet tall. It looked down at them, ready to fight.  
  
From their shorter point of view, though, as soon as it assumed a fighting stance, they were able to see behind it. There was an icy wall that started at the floor and ran halfway up toward the ceiling. Behind it they got a glimpse of Henry, and a small kid that must have been Adri sitting a few feet behind him, at one far corner of the room.  
  
“Moms,” he yelled as soon as he saw them as well.  
  
The monster, who was already ready to attack the intruders, turned around toward the kids. In one swift motion, it threw one of his icy attacks where Adri was now curled up. Before it hit him, though, Henry jumped in front of it, and a second later he fell on the ground; his whole body was enclosed in a big block of ice.  
  
“Henry,” Regina cried out, then with fire in her eyes, she started throwing fireballs.  
  
The other three women soon joined her in attacking the monster. Being the bigger one yet, it took them longer than with the others to reduce it to a huge puddle. But sooner or later they did; especially thanks to Emma’s and Regina’s magic being fueled by their anger toward it and their love for their son.  
  
“Henry,” cried out Emma this time, as they were running toward their son.  
With their combined magic, once again, they were able to break through most of the ice around him. When there was only a thin layer, the magic stopped working on it.  
  
In the meanwhile, Adri had come running toward his sister and was now hugging her tightly with his arms around her legs.  
  
Noticing that the magic had stopped working, Elsa tried to step forward to help them, only to be stopped by her girlfriend gentle hand on her shoulder.  
  
“Let them,” she told her.  
  
Regina had started throwing fireballs at the last layer of ice, only to stop when she realized Henry was grimacing every time she did so.  
  
“Wait,” said Emma, kneeling down next to their son “this is basically hypothermia, isn’t it? It was in one of my tests the other day. We need to bring him home first.”  
  
She leaned forward and placed a kiss on her son’s forehead; there was a hint of True Love magic that died down as soon as it started.  
  
“Regina?” she called for the other woman that was still standing there, looking down at her hands in shock. She had never seen her like that before. “Regina?” she said again.  
  
“I think we need to both kiss him for it to work,” she added as soon as her eyes met big, worried, brown ones.  
  
Regina nodded then, and kneeled down next to them.  
  
“When we get to Storybrooke, we will reappear where we were before, right?”  
  
“Right,” replied Regina. Understanding what she meant, she added: “I’ll poof myself wherever he is at school, you get home and get whatever we need ready.”  
  
They both kissed their son on the forehead at the same time, the True Love kiss working all the way through.  
  
“Thank you,” they heard Agni yell after them as they were being transported back home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * I put a link to the Instagram post that I used there. I know I have been trying to put everything as relevant as possible to the year they are supposed to be in, and that post was made this year. When I read it, I could see Emma saying something like to Regina, so I had to use it :)


	14. Chapter 14

She didn’t even finish being poofed in her office seated behind her desk, that Regina was poofing herself where Henry was. She found him laying on the ground in the middle of his school’s hallway, just in front of his locker. He was decisively warmer than he had been in Arendelle, but his clothes where still soaked in water. She immediately transported both of them to Henry’s room, where Emma was already waiting for them, blankets stacked up in her arms.  
  
Henry was laying down in his bed, while Regina was standing next to it.  
  
“We need to change him in dry clothes first,” Emma urged her.  
  
With a flick of her hand Regina did just that, then she covered him with the sheets pooled down at the foot of his bed.  
  
“Good,” Emma said, starting to cover him with more blankets, trying to remember everything she had read in her textbook “cover his head as well, but not the face.”  
  
“Check his breathing, too,” she added as Regina was covering their son’s head.  
  
Regina leaned forward, her ear inches away from his mouth, when he opened his eyes.  
  
“Moms?”  
  
“My little prince,” Regina said, looking up at him, brushing a few strands of hair from his forehead.  
  
Emma walked to them, and leaned over him on the other side of the bed.  
  
“Moms,” he repeated “I am okay now. A bit warm now, actually.”  
  
A tear escaped Regina’s eye at that.  
  
“I am, really,” he said firmly, before he sat upright, blankets falling from his body, and hugged his mom tightly.  
  
Regina hugged him back just as tightly. “My little prince,” she whispered again in his embrace.

 

* * *

  
  
Even though he had assured them several times that he was completely fine, ‘True Love was the most powerful magic after all’ he told them, they both insisted he should stay in bed for the rest of the day. He tried to protest against Regina wanting him to drink something warm since they were indeed in the middle of Summer, but when he saw the look on her face, he took the mug she was handing him and drank all its content. They agreed on leaving him with only one of the covers on, though.  
  
Not even an hour since they had all poofed back in Storybrooke, all four of his grandparents had gone to visit him. Rumors travelled really fast in town, especially when it comes to the former Evil Queen poofing her unconscious son away from the middle of his school. She hand’t noticed at the moment, but a few other kids had seen her and had gone to inform Snow immediately. Snow had called Charming first, then Belle. They stayed at the mansion an half hour, before Regina respectfully kicked them out, insisting that her Little Prince needed time to rest.  
  
Now, him and his two moms were in his room watching a movie. He was still laying down on his bed, Emma and Regina had each placed a chair at either sides of it.  
  
“Do you want to watch another one?” asked Regina after the second movie of the night.  
  
“I don’t feel like watching another movie now.”  
  
“What about a board game?”  
  
“It’s eleven o’clock at night,” he pointed out, then noticed her still worried expression “mom, I am fine, really.”“Are you sure?” she questioned him.  
  
“Yes. I just need to sleep now,” he said with a yawn.  
  
“Do you want us to sleep in here for tonight?”  
  
Emma and Henry exchanged a look, one she noticed as well. “Okay, okay. Mama bear mode is off for the night. But if you need anything, just call us, okay?”  
  
He smiled and nodded at her. He hugged them both tightly, before wishing them good night. They each hugged him back and kissed him on the forehead.  
  
“Wanna play a board game?” Emma teased her once they were out in the hallway.  
  
“Haha funny.”  
  
“Let’s go to bed, shall we?”  
  
Regina nodded, and they walked to their room. Fifteen minutes later, they were laying in bed, both on their sides, facing each other.  
  
“Tell me about Henry’s early childhood,” Emma whispered what felt ages later and neither of them had fallen asleep yet.  
  
“What do you want to know?”  
  
“Anything, really. I know I have the memory you gave me of raising him, but… but I am sure it is different hearing them from you.”  
  
“Okay,” replied Regina, before closing her eyes to think about the perfect story to tell her.  
  
“Did I ever tell you about his first word?” she asked moments later, opening her eyes again.  
  
Emma shook her head no.  
  
“His first word was actually ‘book’,” she recalled with a warm smile “I was reading him a bedtime story, and he pointed at the one in my hands and clearly said the word ‘book.’ He did try talking before that time, of course. But that was his first clear word.”  
  
Emma laughed warmly at that. “I told you the kid is a nerd just as you are. And just as smart, too.”  
  
Regina smiled, and closed her eyes again, deep into thought. She was trying to pick and choose from all the memories she cherished so much.  
  
“This one time,” she started talking again a few minutes later “I think he was four or five at the time. Anyway, he had been sleeping soundly for a couple of hours already, and I had just gone downstairs to get myself a cup of tea, when I heard a loud thud coming from the foyer. When I reached it, Henry was sitting on the last step. I thought I would find him crying, but he was laughing instead. He was so proud of the fact that he had been able to bypass the childproof gate I had installed at the top of the stairs. And even prouder about the fact that he had been able to walk down on his own for almost the whole entirety of the staircase. He didn’t even care that he had come tumbling down the last five or six stairs.”  
  
“That sounds so much like Henry,” Emma commented “I can almost see his satisfied face when he realized he had been able to do all those things on his own. Did he ever try again?”  
  
“He did. But by that time I had already called Marco and he had installed better childproof gates at the top and at the end of the stairs.”  
  
“That one he takes from you,” Regina said with a smile. Her eyes closing once again. She stayed like that, without saying a word, that Emma thought she had fallen asleep. Then she started talking again.  
  
“This other time,” she said, her eyes sad already at the memory “it was a month or two before he came to get you.”  
  
She paused for a moment, and Emma took advantage of the silence to scoot over and get closer to her.  
  
“He showed me that he had just lost one of his baby teeth, and he told me very seriously that if he could prove that the tooth fairy was real, he was going to prove that what he was saying about fairytales had been real as well. That I was indeed the Evil Queen.”  
  
She took a deep breath and continued. “I spent the entire day debating whether to bring him the usual money I hid under his pillow while he was sleeping or not. I did so till three in the morning, when I decided to just do as I always did. I tiptoed into his room, took the baby tooth and placed the money in its place. The moment I went to retreat my hand, he lightly grabbed my wrist and whispered ‘I love you, mommy.’ Then he let go of me again. I don’t think he even remembers doing so.”  
  
There were now tears trying to break free from her eyes, but she kept explaining nonetheless. She had never told anyone that story before.   
  
“That gesture, that small gesture done in such a vulnerable moment, was the last thing that pushed me into denying the reality of what he was saying. I was so afraid of losing that, of losing him, that I ultimately held on to him too tight. So tight, in fact, that I ended up really losing him for a while there.”  
  
She was crying so hard now, that Emma wrapped her arms around her and brought her closer to herself.  
  
“Today I almost lost him just as I almost lost him all those years ago,” she was now sobbing, with her head resting against Emma’s shoulder.  
  
“You didn’t lose him, though,” Emma tried to comfort her while running her hand up and down her back “he is all good, sleeping in the other room right now.”  
  
“I know,” she replied, still between tears “and I know you almost lost him, too. I wasn’t saying…”  
  
“I know.” She brought her hand to the back of her head and leaned over to kiss her on top of it. “I know what you meant.”  
  
“I am sorry I froze a few times today, when all we needed to do was act fast.”  
  
“Hey.” Emma sneaked her hand between their bodies, and brought it under her chin to lift her head to her eye level. “This is what I am here for, we work together. Whatever you can’t do at any particular moment, I will. Okay?”  
  
“Okay.”  
  
Emma brushed a few tears off her cheeks and hugged her close to herself. Regina hugged her back just as tightly, her cheek resting against her chest.  
  
“We are all okay,” Emma reassured her, hand once again running up and down her back.  
  
It took Regina a while to calm down and slow down her breathing after all the crying she had done. Once she did, though, she looked up at the other woman, and whispered her name.  
  
“Emma?”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“I love you.”  
  
“I love you, too.” She smiled softly at her girlfriend in her arms. Telling someone else she loved them in a romantic way had never felt as right as it did in that moment.  
  
Regina snuggled her face into her shoulder once again, and they both slowly started to drift into a deep sleep. Emma held her close to herself throughout the whole night and well into the next morning.

 

* * *

  
  
  
“Have you ever thought about getting a pool?” Emma asked from her position in the middle of the bed.  
  
“A what?” Regina asked from the adjacent bathroom. She was in front of the mirror, removing the makeup for the night.  
  
“A pool. You know, a swimming pool.”  
  
“I considered the idea when Henry asked for one when he was about seven, but then I decided not to.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“Because,” said Regina entering the room “I didn’t think it would have been safe with a small child. Especially since I did not know how to swim myself. Still don’t, by the way.”  
  
“What?” Emma pushed herself up on her elbows. “There were no swimming lessons in the Enchanted Forest?”  
  
“Well, Cora thought that only peasants went swimming in the lake, so I never got the opportunity to learn growing up.” She sat at the edge of the bed. “Then, once she was gone, I didn’t really trust anyone to teach me without trying to get rid of me. You know, being the Evil Queen and all.”  
  
“That makes sense.”  
  
“Moms?” Henry called for them while knocking on their door “Can I come in?”  
  
“Yeah.” “Of course.” said Emma and Regina respectively.  
  
He turned the knob and pushed the door open.  
  
“Ma,” he exclaimed immediately “why are you half naked?”  
  
“Half naked? I am more covered than I would be if we were at the beach.” She was wearing her boxers and her sport bra.  
  
“Still not covered enough.”  
  
“Dude, it’s too hot today.”  
  
“Whatever.” He rolled his eyes and looked away.  
  
“Did you need anything?” asked Regina.  
  
“Yes!” He was already grinning. “Do you  know what’s in less than a month?”  
  
“August?” said Emma first, before Regina could answer.  
  
“More specifically?”  
  
“The middle of August?” Emma said with a wink at Regina.  
  
“Ugh,” he crossed his arms over his chest “you really don’t remember?”  
  
“Of course I do remember, kid. I was there.”  
  
“Thanks for the reminder, ma.”  
  
“You are almost fourteen now. You didn’t think a stork brought you into this world, dropping you right into my arms?”  
  
“Of course not.” His face was red now.  
  
“Henry,” said Regina instead “did you want to tell us something about your birthday?”  
  
“Yes,” he was grinning again now “I was thinking of maybe having a party?”  
  
“If it is okay with you two, of course,” he added.  
  
Regina and Emma looked at each other in the eye for a moment, then both nodded.  
  
“It can be done,” said Regina.  
  
“Fine by me,” said Emma.  
  
“Awesome!” He smiled widely, they ran out of the room, closing the door behind him.  
  
“Hey, Regina?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Know what I haven’t asked you?”  
  
“If we can get a pool?”  
  
“No. Well, I mean… I wouldn’t mind that. But, I meant… I never asked you when your birthday is.”  
  
“Oh,” she placed both hands on her thighs and stood up “it’s on February 1st.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
“Good?”  
  
“Yeah, good. It means I didn’t miss your birthday since we got together.”  
  
“You didn’t.” Regina smiled and walked to the bathroom door, then turned around again. “I am going to take a shower now.”  
  
“Can I join you?” Emma asked with a smirk.  
  
“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”  
  
Emma immediately jumped on her feet, and joined her.  
  
“So, are we having a pool party for the kid this year?” she asked, getting inside after Regina and locking the door behind her.  
  
  


* * *

 

  
  
Emma poofed herself in front of the diner; she knew that poofing right in the middle of it was a big no. She walked inside and toward one of the booths, already knowing her destination.  
  
“Mom,” she said, causing Snow to turn around and face her.  
  
“Emma,” she replied, putting the bag on her shoulder and getting up “I was… I was just about ready to leave.”  
  
Not expecting her to leave so soon, she simply looked her move pass her with wide eyes. It was physically impossible for her mother to be already done with her lunch: she had asked Granny to text her as soon as Snow was at the diner on her own. Granny had texted her merely two minutes before she had poofed herself in front of the building. She still hadn’t had the chance to talk to Snow one on one, so she had been in a hurry to get there.  
  
“Do you dislike me being with Regina that much?” she asked once she regained her voice.    
  
Snow was already in front of the door. She stopped at her daughter’s remark. She didn’t have time to turn around again that Emma added: “Oh, and mom? I wanted to talk to you today to invite you to Henry’s birthday as well. You know? Your grandson.”  
  
At that, Snow finally turned around and walked to the booth where she was previously sitting.  
  
“Sit with me, please?” she told her daughter, while sitting down herself.  
  
“I am not against the relationship you and Regina have.”  
  
“Nice way of showing it.”  
  
“I really am not.”  
  
Snow tried to take her hand in hers, but Emma didn’t let her.  
  
“Are you upset because you liked Hook that much?” she asked, tilting her head in question “Because that relationship was… well, not a relationship.”  
  
“Oh, honey, no. I barely put up with him because I thought you liked him. I never really understood what you could see in him.”  
  
“So, what’s wrong?” Emma started fidgeting with the napkin in front of her on the table.  
  
“I…” started Snow lowering her head.  
  
“What?”  
  
“I feel guilty.”  
  
“About what?”  
  
“About pushing you toward the wrong people. Even when I didn’t know you were my daughter, I tried to insist that you had feeling for Graham.”  
  
“Well, that was your curse persona. That wasn’t really you.”  
  
“What about when Neal showed up? I did push you to get back together with him, insisting that he was the father of your son.”  
  
“Okay, you are right,” Emma chuckled awkwardly “that wasn’t funny at all.”  
  
“I almost asked you if you had history with Lily when she got to town, but you were already saying you were dating Hook by then.”  
  
“Really?”  
  
“Yes. Most of all, though, I regret not creating a relationship with you were you felt comfortable enough to talk to me about stuff like that. I was surprised when I realized you had romantic feelings for Regina; I wish I had known before you had shared a True Love kiss.”  
  
“If that makes you feel any better, I didn’t fully know that myself. Once it all sank in, I was already the Dark One. By then, I had to keep you all at arm’s length.”  
  
“Fair enough. I am still a bit jealous of how more easily you talk to your father. I mean, I am glad you can talk to him, but you know…”  
  
“Dad is more like me, that’s probably why we get along that well. But we really don’t talk that much.”  
  
Snow laughed then. “You are really not big talkers, you and Charming.”  
  
Emma laughed too at that, then looked her mother in the eye. “So, we are okay now?”  
  
“Yes, honey.” Snow reached for Emma’s hand on the table; Emma accepted it.  
  
“From now on, mom…” she started “we need to be honest about things like that.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“I am and adult now, whether you like it or not. We can’t avoid each other for months again because we don’t want to have a conversation that might be a bit uncomfortable.”  
  
“Was this one uncomfortable?”  
  
“Definitely better than I had imagined.”  
  
“Good.” Snow smiled. “It was better than I had thought as well.”  
  
“Promise, then?”  
  
“I promise.” Snow squeezed her hand in hers.  
  
“About Henry’s birthday,” she added moments later “do you think it is okay if we give him his own bow and arrow? He has been so good with mine.”  
  
“You know it isn’t just up to me, right?”  
  
Snow nodded. “I know. I will have to ask Regina as well then.”  
  
“Thank you.” Emma smiled.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
“Where we supposed to have lunch together?” asked Regina as she saw her “Because I just finished eating.”  
  
“Nope.” Emma sat down on the chair in front of Regina’s desk at the office “I just finished eating as well.”  
  
“How many grilled cheese did you have?”  
  
“Uhmm… one? Why?”  
  
“Because you look happy.”  
  
“I am. Guess what?”  
  
“You had a bear-claw as well?” Regina was stalling now, trying to figure out what could have made her girlfriend that happy.  
  
“It has nothing to do with food.”  
  
“I have no idea then.”  
  
“Fine,” she fake pouted for a moment, then smiled again “I finally talked to Snow.”  
  
“Really? Tell me, did she hate me more when I was actively trying to kill her or now that I am dating her daughter?”  
  
“She doesn’t hate you. She doesn’t hate us being together either.”  
  
“What was wrong with her then?”  
  
“At first I thought she liked Hook that much. So, I asked her if that was the reason why she had been upset for so long.”  
  
“Did she?”  
  
“Nope. She only put up with him because she thought I liked him.”  
  
“Did anyone in your family like the guy?” Regina asked with a chuckle.  
  
“Seems like no-one did.”  
  
“Not so idiotic after all, I am surprised.”  
  
“Then she told me she felt guilty about pushing me toward the wrong people. And she wished she knew I had feelings for you.”  
  
“I figured.”  
  
“I remember. You told me so a while ago.”  
  
“It’s all good now then?”  
  
“It is.”  
  
“I am happy for you, Emma.”  
  
Emma smiled; and as Regina was smiling back, they both sensed the fact that they were about to be poofed away. Again. They both cursed at the same time.


	15. Chapter 15

“Look what we have got here.”  
  
“Emma?” Regina squinted her eyes at the dark figure walking toward her. Her eyes were still adjusting to the darkness around her, when she had heard what sounded like Emma’s voice.  
  
“What? It’s not ‘Miss Swan’ anymore?”  
  
Regina conjured a fireball in her hand. She was once again on the ground; instead of being trapped in bushes, she was in the middle of the woods. She looked at the woman standing above her: she was in the same dress she was wearing the moment they had got back from Camelot. Except one obvious detail was different: her silver hair didn’t look dyed.  
  
“You are not my Emma,” she said, taking a step back. She then realized why her voice sounded like Emma’s, but not quite like hers at the same time.  
  
“Awww, we have moved to ‘my Emma’ now?”  
  
She moved closer before Regina could take another step back, and touched her cheek with the back of her hand. Her skin felt cold against her own.  
  
“Who are you?”  
  
“I am Emma, of course.”  
  
“You are not. You are the Dark One.”  
  
“I prefer Dark Swan, actually.”  
  
“What have you done with her?”  
  
“I haven’t seen her,” told her the Dark Swan towering over her. Emma had always been taller than she was, but she had never felt this intimidated around her. Not even when they had been threatening each other when she had first gotten to town. “In truth, I was hoping she would come running here like the faithful puppy she is as soon as she saw her precious Queen being in danger.”  
  
“Then what?” Regina was trying to find a way to keep the woman busy while she decided the best way to escape: jumping on her feet and make a run for it, or trying to use her magic risking it not working. “You won’t touch a single hair on her head.”  
  
“Or what?” she growled, kneeled down, hand going for her throat. She was about to squeeze, not to kill her, just enough to show her how serious she was, when a familiar voice stopped her.  
  
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”  
  
“She is mine,” the Queen said into the Dark Swan’s ear. Regina looked in astonishment at her own doubleganger standing over her. Well, a doubleganger of her former self: the Queen was wearing one of her Evil Queen attires.  
  
“You are no fun.” Regina noticed how her voice went from a deep one to an almost childish one.  
  
“We agreed.”  
  
“Fine.” She crossed her arms and stepped. “Emma is mine, though. All mine.”  
  
The Queen dismissed her with her left hand. At the same time, she flicked the other and made Regina stand at her eye level.  
  
“Look what we have got here.”  
  
“Do you have a script around here?” asked Regina, unable to refrain a sarcastic comment “Or do you just not have any imagination you two?”  
  
“Silence.” The Queen growled in her face, bringing a hand to her throat just as the other had done moments before. She, unlike Emma’s doubleganger, started to really squeeze tight.  
  
“You won’t speak unless I tell you to. Understood?”  
  
Regina nodded with watery eyes. She started coughing as soon as the Queen had removed her hand.  
  
“When did you start stooping so low? Taking orders so easily. Not wanting the Savior to get hurt.”  
  
Regina bit her tongue, hard. She was still trying to find a way out, enraging the Queen wasn’t going to help her accomplish that. She looked around in the dark forest, only then realizing there were a few lights here and there to illuminate it enough for them to see.  
  
“I asked you a question.” She was already losing her temper. “I see how it is. You have become a good girl now. You may speak.”  
  
“When did you start being such a bitch?” She really tried there, but once again, she wasn’t able to stop herself from using a good come back. “Oh, wait. You never stopped.”  
  
The Queen raised her hand, ready to strike her right in the face. Regina’s thinking was quicker though: she took a hold of her wrist and brought it down. The next moment, she was twisting it against her back. Her magic, or at least part of it, seemed to still be there.  
  
“Don’t you try and help me over here,” she barked at the Dark Swan as Regina brought her other arm behind her back.  
  
“I thought she was yours.”  
  
“Oh, for the love of…”  
  
The Dark Swan rolled her eyes, before laughing herself forward, throwing Regina against the nearest tree.  
  
“Happy now?” she asked, looking over her shoulder.  
  
“Yes. But now focus. Unless you are as useless as that more boring version of yourself.”  
  
Just as Regina had predicted hearing those words, she was the one paying for them. Her hands were now tied up together behind her back.  
  
“Not so useless, uh?”  
  
The Queen made another dismissive gesture in her direction.  
  
“What do you want more? Do you want me to kill her?”  
  
“If you must.”  
  
“Step away from my girlfriend.” Emma’s voice came strong from somewhere behind the trees.  
  
When the Dark Swan turned around to face her, her face turned immediately pale.  
  
“This isn’t some kind of kinky fantasy of yours that is playing out, is it?” she asked Regina.  
  
“No,” she replied outraged. And only because Emma herself would have been involved in any of her fantasies.  
  
“Just checking.” Emma was now close enough, pointing a sword at her doubleganger’s throat “Step. Away. From. My. Girlfriend.”  
  
“Looks like your puppy has finally joined us,” the Queen said, looking at her nails. Regina was still trying to understand what she was playing at. If she had been fully focused, she could have had Emma killed already.  
  
“Yes. And she is angry.” The Dark Swan almost beamed.  
  
Emma squinted her eyes at Regina, silently asking her if she knew what was going on. Regina shook her head no, only slightly.  
  
“Stop whatever you two are doing.” The Queen was paying attention after all.  
  
“What are they doing?”  
  
“They are doing that annoying thing couples in love do where they talk without actually talking.” She made quotation marks with her fingers at the words ‘in love.’  
  
“Why did you bring us here anyway? To listen to your nonsense?”  
  
“Didn’t I tell you not to talk unless I told you you could?”  
  
“You didn’t tell me that.” Emma was pointing her sword toward the Queen “Answer her.”  
  
“You brought us here. We should be asking all the questions.”  
  
“Who are you supposed to be, anyway?” asked Regina. For good measure Emma brought her sword even closer to the Queen’s chest.  
  
“We are the best parts of yourselves. I thought that part was clear.”  
  
“You mean, the worst?” asked Emma now.  
  
“It all depends at how you look at it, dear,” she smirked.  
  
“Don’t you dare call her that again.”  
  
“Jealous, aren’t we?” The Queen lowered Emma’s sword with no effort, and got closer to her. She touched her cheek with the back of her hand just as the Dark Swan had done with Regina before. “Afraid I’ll bring her to the dark side as well?”  
  
Emma shivered at the touch. She knew this wasn’t her Regina, she was fully aware of that. She still moved and talked exactly as she did when she had first met her all those years back, and that gave her goosebumps.  
  
“Enough,” she said, pushing the Queen’s hand away from her face “There must a specific reason why we are here.”  
  
“And there must be a way to get back home,” finished Regina.  
  
They looked at one another, and started having another silent conversation.  
  
“Care to share with the rest of us?” The Queen sounding ever so annoyed.  
  
“We think we know how to do that.”  
  
“Don’t keep it to yourself then.” The Dark Swan got almost too close to Regina again.  
  
“Free me and we’ll talk.” Regina turned around on the spot, pointed her still tied hands toward her.  
  
“You are not seriously considering freeing her?” The Queen took a step forward only to be stopped by Emma raising her sword again.  
  
“This isn’t fun at all. I am getting bored.” She flicked her hand and the rope around Regina’s wrists disappeared.  
  
“You fool.”  
  
“What would you have done, uh?”  
  
Taking advantage of their squabbling, Emma and Regina both raised a hand in front of themselves making a room with no doors appear around them. There was nothing else in the room besides them and four chairs. Two were in one corner of it, the other two in the other corner.  
  
“What the hell?” The Queen was the one noticing the change first.  
  
“Come with me,” said Emma, tapping her doubleganger’s calf with the flat of her sword and pointing it at a set of chair. Reluctantly, her orders were followed.  
  
“Sit down,” she said next.  
  
“If it is sex what you wanted, you just needed to ask.” She grinned.  
  
“Sit down,” she repeated more firmly this time.  
  
“Okay, okay.” She raised her hands up and did what she was told.  
  
Emma turned the other chair around and sat on it backwards, arms placed on the back of it.  
  
Meanwhile, Regina had simply magicked the Queen at one of the chairs on the opposite side of the room as she stood next to the one she was going to sit on.  
  
“What’s this?” she asked with an eye roll “Therapy session?”  
  
“Almost. Whatever it is that brought us here, you don’t know how to go back to wherever you came from either,” said Regina.  
  
“And you can’t kill us either, or you would have done it already,” finished Emma.  
  
“So, now we are going to talk and figure out what is wrong here.”  
  
“For starters, this annoying thing you just did: the finishing each other’s sentences bit. That is annoying.”  
  
“I almost forgot how sassy yet bitter you could be at the beginning,” pointed out Emma.  
  
“You let the Charmings’ spawn talk to you like that?”  
  
“You let me talk to you like that,” said the Dark Swan, while Emma asked puzzled: “Charmings’ spawn?”  
  
“I thought you love birds told each other everything,” the Queen told them with a dark chuckle “And I don’t let you talk to me like that. Unless we are roleplaying, of course.”  
  
“That’s how I called you in my head when you first got here,” Regina admitted to Emma.  
  
“That’s funny, actually. I’m not sure my parents would agree, though.”  
  
“Who cares about what they think?” whined her other self.  
  
“I do.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Because…”  
  
“Emma! Don’t let her get to you.”  
  
“Look who is always ready to rescue the puppy. Can’t you just shut up for a second?” The Queen tried to use her magic on Regina: she flicked her hand a few times in front of her face with no apparent result.  
  
“Do you think we were going to be locked with you two in a room with no doors and leave you with your magic?”  
  
“Impossible,” the Queen growled, getting on her feet “you wouldn’t be in a locked room with us without your own magic.”  
  
“Who said we didn’t have magic?” Regina said, smirking, while pushing her back on the chair behind her using her magic.  
  
“What was that?” she added with another flick of her hand “Can’t you just shut up for a second?”  
  
She tried arguing back, but her voice was gone. When she realized Regina had taken her voice, she tried standing up again, only to be pushed in sitting position again.  
  
“Uh-uh. You are going to sit there and we are going to talk, understood?”  
  
The Queen nodded slightly, her lips pursed.  
  
“Who is taking orders now, uh?” asked Regina, finally sitting down in front of her.  
  
Both Emma and her doubleganger followed the whole scene closely, both with wide eyes. When it appeared to be over, Emma shook her head to focus on her own task.  
  
“Let’s get down to business then,” she said, causing the other to snap back to the present as well.  
  
“What’s wrong with you?”  
  
“What’s wrong with you?” her doubleganger repeated.  
  
“Where are we, in junior high?”  
  
“As if you have been to junior high.”  
  
“I am serious.”  
  
“So am I. What is wrong with you?”  
  
“Me? Nothing is wrong with me.”  
  
“How many times have we used that excuse?”  
  
Emma looked down at the space between their chairs.  
  
“In the past four years alone we have used it quite a bit.”  
  
“If you know so much about me, then you tell me what’s wrong with me,” Emma blurted out.  
  
“That puppy can still bite,” said the Queen from the other side of the room. Regina placed a silencing spell right in the middle of it.  
  
“Let’s see, where do I start?”  
  
“You can start anywhere, it is all going to be bullshit anyway.”  
  
“Still denying yourself stuff, I see.”  
  
“What are you talking about?”  
  
“You are still not over the fact that you have been dumped in a wardrobe moments after you were born.” The Dark Swan got up, turned her chair around as well and mimicked Emma’s positioning. “Especially from what we learned in Camelot.”  
  
“What did we learn in Camelot?” she asked genuinely confused. The fact that she kept switching between ‘you’ and ‘we’ didn’t help either.  
  
“Need a reminder?”  
  
“Yes!”  
  
“In Camelot, thanks to the Rumple in our head, we learned that your parents had the chance to reunite with you before your twenty-eighth birthday, but didn’t.”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“I mean,” she rolled her eyes at her as Emma would do to her own self when she wasn’t getting something right away, not that she really had any details besides what she was telling her “Snow and Charming woke up from the curse when you were ten, but decided not to come and get you. They decided that waiting until you were the right age was the best thing to do to save the whole town.”  
  
“I… you are just saying that to upset me.”  
  
“Don’t believe me? Just ask them whenever you find a way out of here.”  
  
“Let’s say it is true. Let’s say what you are telling me actually happened, what do you want me to do?”  
  
“Make them pay for what they have done to you. For what they have forced you to go through.”  
  
Emma closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She had indeed thought about making her parents pay for abandoning her; she had thought about it a lot growing up in foster homes and after she had gone to jail. She had switched a lot between that and wanting to find them and be a happy family together during the years.  
  
“They are your family, after all. They should have been there for you.”  
  
“Look,” she started, opening her eyes “I love my parents. I really do. But Henry is my family. And that woman over there?” She turned around and pointed at Regina.  
  
“That woman right there? She is my family. Our family. She is there for me whenever I need her, just as much as I am there for her. That’s exactly what family is. And sometimes family isn’t the one that raises you or you share DNA with.”  
  
“You are not upset then?”  
  
“I think part of me will always be at least a little bit hurt because of how my parents handled things. And you just made me realize that I must have one hell of a difficult conversation with them when I get home, but no… I am not that upset about it anymore.”  
  
“Part of you must have been.”  
  
“Are you still upset?”  
  
“No,” the Dark Swan admitted reluctantly.  
  
“Then no, no part of me is upset anymore.”  
  
“What do we do now?”  
  
“I guess we wait.”  
  
  
On the other side of the room, the Queen had been so focused on what the other two were doing, trying to listen in in the conversation even though there was a silencing spell, that Regina had ultimately lifted it. She was hoping that listening to them would encourage her to talk as well since she had been so unmovable the whole time.  
  
“Ready to talk now?”  
  
“I think you are the one that needs to talk now.”  
  
“Why don’t we cut the crap so we can get straight to the point?”  
  
“How far back do you want me to go, Regina?” She leaned forward on the chair for a second, then she sat upright again. “To when your sister, half-sister actually, tried to remove you from the face of the earth? Or to that whole arranged marriage with Leopold? Or even better, to your childhood with Cora?”  
  
A chill ran down Regina’s spine at the mention of all those people that had hurt her or tried to hurt her over the years.  
  
“Your Savior over there thinks her family is crap because they put her in a tree. That doesn’t come even close to what we have experienced.”  
  
“This is not a competition and you know it.”  
  
“Fine.” The Queen flipped her hair back. “But you have to admit all those people hurt you. Us.”  
  
“I have never denied it.”  
  
“How are you not angry anymore? How can you be so calm?”  
  
“Trust me…” Regina balled her hands into fists. “I am not that calm about all of it.”  
  
“You are still not doing anything,” she hissed back “you are just there living the perfect life with Henry and your precious Savior.”  
  
“Isn’t this what we have always wanted? People who loved us just as we are.”  
  
“Yes, but…” she instinctively stood up, hand ready to throw a fireball in front of her, only to be reminded of her lack of magic. She sat down again, resigned.  
  
“All those people you mentioned before: Zelena, Leopold, Cora,” she still got a cold chill mentioning them by name “they are all dead now. They can’t hurt you anymore. Don’t let their memory hunt you. Let your anger go.”  
  
“I don’t know what to do without my anger. I don’t even know who I am without it.”  
  
“You can be and do whatever you want.”  
  
“Just like you did?” she asked biting her lower lip.  
  
“Just like I did.”  
  
“Are you really happy?”  
  
“I am.” Regina smiled and turned around to face Emma; she then nodded and the other two women stood up and walked toward them.  
  
“What do we do now?” asked Emma.  
  
“Try to go back home the same way we always do.”  
  
“How do we go back?” asked her doubleganger.  
  
“Where did you come from, anyway? You never answered that.”  
  
“Enchanted Forest. A parallel universe from the one you are used to.”  
  
“And you are a couple?”  
  
“Yes,” replied the Dark Swan; “Friends with benefits,” replied the Queen.  
  
“Well, you have got time to figure it out.” Regina grinned and flicked her hands returning them their magic. “Try going there now.”  
  
With a flick of her own hand, the Queen poofed them away.  
  
“That was a trip,” said Emma getting close to her one and only Queen.  
  
“That’s an understatement.”  
  
“Ready to go home?” Emma wrapped her arms around her waist bringing her closer to herself.  
  
“More than.” She wrapped her own around the other woman and met her halfway till their lips touched. This time, the True Love kiss shared to bring themselves home felt stronger than it ever did on all those other occasions.  
  



	16. Chapter 16

They fell back on their respective chairs in Regina’s office with a loud thump.  
  
“Ouch,” Emma said bringing a hand to her back “this is by far the most painful landing back we have experienced.”  
  
“I agree.” Regina massaged the underside of her thighs.  
  
“Madam Mayor,” her assistant exclaimed while barging in the room.  
  
“Oh!” He looked at the two women, and lowered his gaze to the floor. “Miss Swan is here, I apologize for the interruption.”  
  
“Andrew?” Regina called for him as he was closing the door behind himself again.  
  
“Yes, Madam Mayor?”  
  
“You can take the rest of the day off.”  
  
“It is only three pm, ma’am.” He even looked at the watch on his wrist for emphasis.  
  
“That’s fine, we are done here for the day. Go watch a movie or something.”  
  
“Yes, ma’am.” He blushed slightly now looking from one woman to the other. “Thank you, Madam Mayor.” Then he rushed out the door even quicker than he had barged in when he thought his boss was in danger.  
  
“He still didn’t get the memo that you are not the Evil Queen anymore?” Emma pointed at the now closed door. “With all those ‘yes, ma’am’ and ‘thank you, Madam Mayor,’ I almost expect him to start calling you ‘Your majesty.'”  
  
“I don’t think he did.” Regina rolled her eyes. “And I told him repeatedly to drop the formalities. Especially if he has to call me several times a day. He is very good at his job, though, so I let it slide.”  
  
“Have you seen how he ran out of here?” Emma chuckled now. “I am pretty sure he thought we were about to have sex in here.”  
  
“From the way he was blushing, I am sure that’s what was going on in his head.”  
  
“That must have been part of the vision you had in Camelot, right?” Regina asked as Emma was still massaging a spot on her lower back.  
  
“Yeah. I thought so too. What I had taken for me having embraced the darkness completely back then… what I had thought was dark magic emanating from my every pore, was simply a manifestation of my darkest thoughts.”  
  
“I did not see that coming, at all. For a moment there at the beginning I thought I’d die at my own hands. Or well, the hands of someone that looked exactly like me.”  
  
“Me neither.”  
  
“Have you noticed how it seems we keep getting transported somewhere almost exactly every month?”  
  
“Ugh,” Emma said leaning forward on the chair “as if I need another thing to dread once a month.”  
  
“Whoever or whatever is causing it must have a dark sense of humor.”  
  
“Hey.” Emma sat upright now, raising an eyebrow. “Have you ever thought that whoever is behind this wants us to break up?”  
  
“Yes, I have.”  
  
“Oh.” She looked down at her own shoes.  
  
“I have considered the possibility that someone was trying to keep us apart, yes,” Regina said placing her hands on the desk in front of her “but I have never entertained the thought. It has never been an option for me.”  
  
“Yeah?” Emma looked up again.  
  
“Yes!”  
  
“Even with all these weird things happening to us?”  
  
“Even with that, yes.” She smiled softly, then pushed herself up and walked around the desk. She sat sideways on Emma’s lap and added: “Nothing has ever felt as right as being with you.”  
  
“Good.” She placed a kiss on her cheek, wrapping her arms around her middle.  
  
“That’s all I get?” Regina teased.  
  
Emma leaned forward to kiss her softly on the lips, then said: “I love you, Regina.”  
  
“I love you, too.”“Thank you, Madam Mayor,” she said imitating her assistant’s voice.  
  
“You are welcome, Miss Swan.”  
  
Emma laughed and nuzzled her face into Regina’s neck; Regina in return placed an arm over her shoulders.  
  
“Ugh,” she said after a few minutes of comfortable silence “I can’t believe I have to have another uncomfortable conversation with my parents.”  
  
“Why?” Regina looked her in the eye.  
  
“Because of what that other version of myself told me about them waking up from the curse when I was ten. Do you recall any of that?”  
  
“No. I wasn’t even aware of the fact that they had been able to wake up before your twenty-eighth birthday. Maybe Gold knows something?”  
  
“Maybe. I’d rather talk directly to my parents. I did tell them to be honest with me, so I must be honest with them as well.”  
  
“Fair enough. Do you want me to come with you when you do that?”  
  
“Thanks for the offer.” She placed another kiss on Regina’s cheek. “But I think I gotta do it on my own.”  
  
“Of course.”

 

* * *

  
  
  
  
“How did it go?” Regina asked as Emma was joining her and Henry on the couch for movie night.  
  
“Not as bad as I thought. But definitely as awkward as I had expected.”  
  
“Did they remember anything about it?”  
  
“Mom did, dad didn’t. Must have been because he went right back into a coma after that.”  
  
Regina pushed herself up on one hand and looked at her girlfriend on her side, mouth agape. “I can’t believe Snow kept a secret. And for so long.”  
  
“That’s exactly what dad said.”  
  
“I am sure he wasn’t expecting it either. I can’t decide whether I am more shocked or impressed.”  
  
“No, he didn’t for sure.”  
  
“Did they fight over it? I can’t imagine the two idiots having a serious fight.”  
  
“They didn’t. Not it front of me, at least. They did get super silent at one point, though.”  
  
“Are they still coming to my party?” asked Henry.  
  
“Of course. Why shouldn’t they?”  
  
“I don’t know.” He shrugged in response.  
  
“Plus, they have told your mom they are coming. She is going to get them and bring them here if they dare not show up for her Little Prince’s birthday.”  
  
“Damn right a will.” Regina grinned causing Henry to do just the same.  
  
“What are we watching, anyway?” Emma asked, while sinking down on the couch, causally placing a hand on Regina’s thigh.  
  
“Big Hero 6.”  
  
“Oh! I love that movie.”  
  
“It’s not enough that this world has turned our stories into animated movies; one day, with all the ones you watch, you two are going to turn us all into animated characters as well.”  
  
“Come on.” Emma laughed at that remark. “You enjoy watching them too.”  
  
“I didn’t say I didn’t. And I am not admitting it either.”  
  
“Plus, I wouldn’t say that too out loud. That might happen the next time we find ourself in another realm,” Emma whispered.  
  
“Can we watch now?” Henry asked, remote already pointed at the tv set.  
  
“Yeah, kid.” With a flick of her hand she dimmed the lights in the room. Regina snuggled close to her.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
“What are you guys talking about?” asked Emma placing her arm on Regina’s shoulders.  
  
“Just making plans to have lunch together soon,” replied Snow.  
  
“Awesome.” She smiled widely. “Can I steal Regina from you for a moment?”  
  
“Of course.” Snow took a sip of the beverage in her hand and walked toward Archie.  
  
“So, what’s so urgent that couldn’t wait?” Regina asked wrapping her own arm around Emma’s waist.  
  
“I wanted to make sure to tell you how much I am loving everything you did for the kid’s birthday. This party is exactly as he wanted it. I am still a bit disappointed we didn’t have a pool party, though.”  
  
“Maybe next year.”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Maybe…”  
  
They were in the middle of the mansion’s backyard, there were tables covered with food and gifts all over. Everyone in town had joined them to celebrate their son’s birthday. He really only payed attention to his classmates, but he was still clearly happy to have everyone there just for him.  
  
“I still can’t believe you said yes to Snow’s gift.”  
  
“Things just got better between you two, I didn’t want to ruin that. Plus…”  
  
“Plus?”  
  
“I put a spell on it as soon as she brought it over. Now Henry can’t get hurt with it, whether he is the one using it or not.”  
  
“I knew you had something up your sleeve when you agreed so quickly to her request.”  
  
“Of course I did.”  
“Emma!” came a loud voice from behind them.  
  
They turned around just in time for Ruby to get to them and envelop Emma in a tight hug. She hugged her immediately back.  
  
“What are you doing here?” she asked as she let go of the other.  
  
“Always so eloquent, uh?” Regina teased her “It’s nice to see you again, Ruby.”  
  
“It’s nice to see you two as well.” Ruby replied, then laughed “To answer your question, Emma, Dorothy and I just got to Storybrooke earlier today. When Granny told us about the party, of course I had to come and celebrate your kid.”  
  
“Where is Dorothy now?”  
  
“She stopped somewhere over there with Granny,” she gestured toward a far corner of the yard “they are already going along so well.”  
  
“That’s good.” Emma smiled. “Are you here on vacation or are you here to stay?”  
  
“We haven’t decided yet, honestly. We finally rid Oz of all the traps left behind by Zelena, when we decided we needed a break from that realm. I proposed to come visit Granny since I hadn’t seen her in a while. We are probably going to Kansas next. Dorothy has a couple of friends back there.”  
  
“You deserve a vacation.”  
  
“Where you able to get rid of that annoying flying monkey?” asked Regina instead, recalling the encounter had with Walsh.  
  
“We did. He actually flew away the moment you disappeared from the Emerald Castle. He turned back into a monkey and he was just gone. We haven’t really seen him around since then.”  
  
“Coward,” said Emma.  
  
“Yeah, well… at least he didn’t bother us anymore.”  
  
“That’s true.”  
  
“Oh, I see Henry. Let me go wish him a happy birthday.” Ruby was already walking away. “And come say hi to Dorothy when you can.”  
  
“We will.”  
  
  


* * *

 

  
  
“Hey, Regina.” said Emma locking her car in front of the mansion “wait for me.”  
  
Regina stopped in the middle of the pathway and did just that.  
  
“Hey,” she repeated once she got closer “is the kid back from school already?”  
“He should be. He has a project due tomorrow.”  
  
“Oh, right. He told me last night.”  
  
“Have you noticed it’s been over a month now, and we haven’t moved from Storybrooke once?” asked Regina stopping in her tracks again.  
  
“I did. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to jinx it.”  
  
“Well, I already said it now.”  
  
They walked inside the house where they were met by Henry in the foyer.  
  
“Moms. I gotta finish studying. I’ll be done soon.” He kissed them both on the cheek and ran up the stairs again.  
  
“Dinner is at seven.”  
  
“Yeah, ma. I know.”  
  
“Hey,” said Emma as their son closed his door “can we go to the study to finish our conversation.”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
They both removed their shoes, switching to slippers, then they walked to the study.  
  
“Is something on your mind?” asked Regina before sitting down “Do we need some apple cider? Or maybe something stronger?”  
  
“No, no.”  
  
“Okay.” Regina finally sat down on the couch opposite the one Emma was already sitting on.  
  
“Do you think the reason why we got transported in different realms these past months was because we had to ultimately make peace with our own past?”  
  
“Who would go through the trouble of doing all that just so we could do that?”  
  
“I don’t know. Maybe Lord Voldemort?”  
  
“Because he strikes only at the end of the school year?”  
  
“Hey.” Emma laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that. Nice one.”  
  
“Seriously though, I don’t know.” Emma ran her hand through her hair. “I can’t come up with anything to explain it. Have you and Belle come up with anything?”  
  
“No. We can’t seem to find anything in common between the various times we got poofed away.”  
  
“Any idea where the darker versions of ourselves came from?”  
  
“Where as in location, no. We only know what they have told us. Where as in what year, I am sure you have figure it out for yourself.”  
  
Emma nodded. “Speaking of your past self though.”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Do you remember when I got to the Enchanted Forest in the past?”  
  
“Of course I do.”  
  
“No, I meant… did you know it was me? I never asked you.”  
  
“Yes. Well, I did not know at the moment. I did know it had been you when you got back.”  
  
“You could see through the glamour spell?”  
  
“Of course I did. Rumple must have forgotten just how much he had taught me. How much powerful my magic was already.”  
  
“You were so angry at me when I got back. I never dared asking you anything about it.”  
  
“I was only angry at you because you had gone back in time and almost changed things. You could have changed one small thing and Henry would have never been born.”  
  
“Don’t even think about it.”  
  
“I try not to. But that’s what you get when you interfere with the past.”“I know.” Emma lowered her head.  
  
“It didn’t help the fact that I knew you wanted to bring Henry back to New York. and…” she let it trail off.  
  
“And?” She looked up again.  
  
“And, I wasn’t very fond of the memory of you dancing with the stupid pirate.”  
  
“Don’t remind me of that, he insisted I’d join him so we wouldn’t look out of place.”  
  
“Typical,” Regina snorted.  
  
“What I do remember the most, though, was you checking me out. And now that I know you could actually see me as me… even better.”  
  
“Red does suit you.”  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
It was a few days before her birthday, when Emma was sitting in the walk in closet she shared with Regina. She had a large box in her hands containing various things from her life before Storybrooke.  She picked a cassette tape from it and started singing one of the songs to herself.  
  
“I didn’t know you were into boybands,” said Regina, leaning against the door-stand.  
  
“I was fifteen when this came out.” She tapped the cassette with her index finger. “Of course I love the song.”  
  
“I like it, too,” Regina admitted.  
  
“I would have never pictured you listening to these kind of songs.”  
  
“Well, I had a lot of time on my hands before Henry. What do you have there?”  
  
“Just some stuff from my childhood or whatever.”  
  
“Can I join you?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
Regina first got closer to her, kneeled down, then finally set down next to her with her legs crossed.  
  
“What brings you to memory lane?”  
  
“I…” Emma picked a dreamcatcher from the box and examined it. “I usually go through these things before my birthday.”  
  
“I didn’t know that.”  
  
“I haven’t done it since I got here.”  
  
“We rarely got time to celebrate important things in the past, didn’t we?”  
  
“Yeap.”  
  
“Do you want to do anything in particular for your birthday this Saturday?”  
  
“Uhmmm… not really.” She was now reaching for something specific in her box.  
  
“You sure?”  
  
“Yes,” she nodded “just something with you and the kid will make me happy. Nothing fancy or anything. Just a movie or whatever works for me.”  
  
“Deal.”  
  
“Look,” Emma said, finally getting a hold of what she was looking for at the bottom of the box.  
  
“Is that?” Regina asked, taking the item in her hand.  
  
“It is. It was in my things when I got out of jail. One of the guards must have slipped it in: Henry’s very last ultrasound picture.”  
  
  
“I am probably biased, but he was already so beautiful.”  
  
“I am biased, too,” Emma chuckled “but yes, he was.”  
  
“That’s where it was,” Regina lightly touched Emma’s baby blanket with her fingertips. “I haven’t seen it since I used it to get to Camelot.”  
  
“Yeah, I got it the moment we got back to Storybrooke.”  
  
“I was wondering if I had ended up leaving it in Camelot by mistake.”  
  
“How come you didn’t ask me?”“In case I was right and had indeed forgotten it there. I know it is one of your most treasured possessions.”  
  
“It is.” Emma picked it up and brought it to her chest, hugging it close to herself. “But still just an object. I wouldn’t have been upset if that had been the case. You did use to come and save me.”  
  
“I will have to keep that in mind.”  
  
“Yeah, you do that.” Emma placed the blanket back in its place and closed the lid of the box.  
  
Regina leaned her head on her shoulder and closed her eyes. “Can we stay here for a bit?” she whispered.  
  
“Yeap.” Emma leaned her head against Regina’s and closed her eyes as well.  
  
  


* * *

 

  
  
Months had gone by uninterrupted; Regina’s birthday was now fast approaching. After Emma’s birthday, or even before that at the beginning of August, their lives had proceeded as usual. They were now fully synched with their routines, without ever letting their relationship get boring. There were a lot of things they were still learning about one another; other things still left to share or discover.  
  
During the holidays, they even spent some of them with the Charmings, or ‘the two idiots’ as Regina would say. That had made Henry extremely happy; maybe it had been the bicycle he had requested and received for Christmas from his two moms. Either way, the whole family had been happy to spend time together.  
  
“What did you usually do for your birthday?” Emma asked now, sitting at one of the stools in the kitchen.  
  
“I never really got to celebrate my birthday when I was little. Mother thought it was for peasants only.”  
  
“I sense a pattern here.”  
  
“Yes. Cora thought anything that she didn’t like personally was only reserved to peasants.”  
  
“That must have been fun,” Emma said drily.  
  
“Better than when I reached a certain age and she started throwing parties, not even close to my actual birthday, to catch me a suitor.”  
  
“Really? Why didn’t she throw them at your actual birthday?”  
  
“She preferred to have them in the summer, so I could show more cleavage.”  
  
“Yikes.”  
  
“Indeed. Either way… I wouldn’t know how to truly celebrate my birthday. I ever only organized parties for Henry growing up. Not that I’d want a party, by the way.” She grimaced at the thought.  
  
“Anything you’d like to do?”  
  
“Can we do what we did at your birthday?”  
  
They had ended up going to the movies and then back at Granny’s for dinner. Regina had also asked Granny if she could make a personalized cake for Emma, which she had been more than happy to do.  
  
“Of course.”  
  
Regina smiled before walking to the fridge to retrieve something from it. When she got back to the kitchen island, she started to dice some mozzarella.  
  
“Lasagna, uh?”  
  
“Uh-uh.” Regina stopped what she was doing and looked at Emma: she was almost drooling over the food.  
  
“Fine. You can take one piece. Only one though.”  
  
Emma grinned and examined the already diced pieces closely. When she reached for one, another smaller one stuck to it.  
  
“You can have both,” she conceded, starting to dice again.  
  
Emma smiled widely now and popped both pieces into her mouth.  
  
“Have you ever thought about using magic to cook?”  
  
“Actually, no.”  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“I have been without magic for most of my life between before I learned it and during the curse. It is also quite relaxing.”  
  
“Can I ask you something?”  
  
“It better not be a ‘how old would you be if the curse hadn’t happened?’ kind of question.”

“Of course it isn’t.”  
  
“Then go ahead.”  
  
“I was wondering if you’d like teaching me how to cook more complicated things. I know how to cook basic stuff, as you already know, but that’s it.”  
  
“Oh, I would love to.”  
  


* * *

 

  
  
“I am so glad they have old movies at the local theater on Mondays,” said Emma.  
  
“Me too,” Regina agreed “I wouldn’t have known what to pick from the new ones.”  
  
“There was literally nothing interesting,” replied Henry.  
  
It was the evening of Regina’s birthday and the three of them were getting home from Granny’s. They were in Emma’s yellow bug, the beginning February was too cold to be walking around at that time of day.  
  
“The raspberry chocolate cake Granny made was soooo good.”  
  
“I helped her make it.”  
  
“You have said that at least three times already.”  
  
“I am proud of it, kid. Your mom has been teaching me how to cook and bake. I wanted to show her I had been listening.”  
  
“Whatever.” He took the phone out of his pocket and looked down at it just as they were approaching the mansion.  
  
Emma didn’t even have the time to stop the car, that he was already getting out of it and rushing to the gate.  
  
“Be careful with the ic-“ Regina said, flicking her hand just in time to prevent her son from slipping on said ice.  
  
“Be careful,” she repeated as she got out of the car “what’s the hurry?”  
  
“I have got a Skype date with someone.” He blushed.  
  
“Date, uh?” said Emma “Who is the lucky person?”  
  
“Someone we know?”  
  
“Jeez, I hope not. What’s with all the questions?”  
  
“It was only two. And we are always interested in what’s going on in your life.”  
  
“I’d say you are nosy.”  
  
Emma gasped. “Us? Nosy?”  
“Yes, you two.”  
  
“I am offended,” said Emma.  
  
“Me too,” Regina agreed “We should start checking his phone every time he gets home from now on.”  
  
“No, no,” he almost cried out “I was kidding. You are not nosy at all. You are the perfect mom. Both of you are.”  
  
“That’s what I like to hear on my birthday.” Regina was still teasing him.  
  
“Can I go now?” he asked when they got inside the house.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Happy Birthday again, mom.” He smiled at her and ran up the stairs.  
  
“Hot cocoa?” Emma asked once he was out of earshot.  
  
“Not for me. We just finished having coffee not even twenty minutes ago.”  
  
“Keep me company then?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
As Emma started making herself her beverage, Regina placed the rest of the cake back in the fridge.  
  
“I did appreciate the cake, by the way.”  
  
“You did?”  
  
“Yes, of course.”  
  
They both sat down a couple of minutes later.  
  
“Oh no,” Regina exclaimed.  
  
“What?” Emma asked after taking the first sip of her hot cocoa. Then she felt it too: the familiar tingling all over her body whenever she was about to be poofed away. It was going at slow-motion this time. “Oh!”  
  
“Yeah,” said Regina locking eyes with her before they both disappeared.


	17. Chapter 17

She found herself standing in the middle of familiar woods; she would have recognized them with her eyes closed. So, she did just that: close her eyes and take in her surroundings with her other senses. She had considered the Enchanted Forest her home for so long that she couldn’t avoid smiling. Even though the memories the place evoked in her weren’t all that nice; most of them weren’t nice at all, to be fair. Having appeared there, she had the advantage of knowing how to move around, in case she’d find herself in danger. The people who had made the place a living hell weren’t there anymore, so once she shook off the bad feelings, she opened her eyes again. She immediately started walking in the direction of her former castle.  
  
She hadn’t set foot in it since the year away from Storybrooke. Since that miserable year she had spent away from Henry. The castle had never been as filled with people as that whole period, but to her it still felt completely empty. Every day she missed her Little Prince; and every day she missed Emma a little bit more, not that she would admit it to anyone. Not that anyone asked her either, besides Snow or that annoying Robin who was constantly trying to make things happen between them. She hadn’t actually given in until she had seen Emma with the pirate back in Storybrooke. Knowing that he had been the one able to bring her family back had enraged her. Then she had also found out that Hood had the lion tattoo: that and Tinker Bell making her feel guilty for ruining the man’s life, had caused her to ultimately fall into his arms. She had been glad that, between al the villains trying to either kill them or destroy the town or both, she had actually spent maybe less than a week actually alone with the guy.  
  
Now, she was walking slowly toward her castle. Having both tried to poof herself away and reach either Emma or Henry, she had no other choice than to keep walking till she got there.  
  
Walking inside, she had a feeling of uneasiness that caused her to conjure a fireball in her hand. It was still early in the day outside and it showed in the light getting inside the castle through the windows; all her dark curtains had been drawn back.  
  
“Stop right there,” said someone approaching her.  
  
She did as she was told, only because she wasn’t sure where the person was coming from; the fireball was still in her hand.  
  
A second later, a woman came from her right. She had a bow and arrow aimed at her direction.  
  
“What are you doing in my castle?”  
  
“Your castle?” Regina scoffed.  
  
“You are…”  
  
“Yes, I am the woman in the portraits: The Evil Queen. Well, former now.”  
  
“No,” the woman shook her head no, lowering her weapon slightly “what I meant to say was: you are Regina.”  
  
“Who told you my name?”  
  
“My son!”  
  
“And what is your son’s name?”  
  
“Roland.”  
“You are Marian?”  
  
“Yes. Your clothes gave me pause, but I should have recognized you from those paintings. Roland has showed me them all and told me all about you.”  
  
“Roland is alright then?”  
  
“He is. Why wouldn’t he be?”  
  
“I don’t know how much he has told you, or actually knew in the first place. I made sure he was being taken care of in Storybrooke while we were in Camelot, but when I got back I couldn’t find him anymore.”  
  
“He told me you have saved his life on a few different occasions, and I should thank you for that,” Marian said with a smile “and about what you just mentioned…”  
  
She was interrupted by Roland himself running toward Regina and hugging her tightly. She immediately noticed how taller he had gotten in the almost year she hadn’t seen him. She had always had a soft spot for the kid.  
  
“Regina,” he said.  
  
“Roland,” she said, caressing the top of his head.  
  
He let go of the hug and quickly went to stand next to his mom.  
  
“Is your father with you?” Marian asked.  
  
Before he could answer her, Robin was already walking inside as well.  
  
“Regina?” He had a puzzled expression on his face. “What are you doing here?”  
  
“I should be asking you that. The last time I saw you we were in Camelot. I thought we had left you there.”  
  
“You don’t remember?”  
  
“Remember what?” Regina was now the one with a puzzled expression.  
  
“How about we go sit somewhere and we can explain her everything?” suggested Marian.  
  
“Before we go,” said Regina “have you by any chance seen Emma?”  
  
“The Savior?” asked Robin “No, I haven’t seen her. Was she supposed to be here?”  
  
“She should be.”  
  
“I will go take a look around while Marian starts explaining what happened to us. When I get back I’ll tell you about Camelot. If that’s okay with you?”  
  
There was something different in his voice, something she couldn’t put her finger on. She nodded at the request, she didn’t sense Emma being in danger. She did sense though that she was close enough.  
  
“Buddy, wanna come along?” he asked his son.  
  
Roland didn’t need to be asked twice, he was already at his father’s side and they both started walking outside the castle.  
  
Marian was directing her toward one of her old dining rooms. The long table was still in the middle of it, but a few of the chairs were missing. It was obvious someone had started using it again recently.  
  
“Not to sound rude,” said Regina as they were sitting down “but I thought you were supposed to be dead. Robin told me you had died.”  
  
“I was supposed to be. I almost was, actually. Then circumstances have changed.”  
  
“How so?”  
  
“I got caught in the crossfire between some of your guards, I believe, and some people trying to escape your castle. I was hit right in the chest and I was sure I was going to die right there, away from my family. Then a stranger showed up and healed me, she was gone before I could thank her properly. I passed out as soon as the healing magic hit me.”  
  
Regina froze at the mention of her guards being involved, but she relaxed when she heard no resentment in the other woman’s words.  
  
“How did you find your way back to your family, from the past?”  
  
“When I got back on my feet again, I walked around aimlessly looking for Robin and Roland. When I finally found my way back to our tavern, I found it completely empty, as if no-one had set foot in it in years. The forest all around me had changed as well, that’s why it took me a few days to get back there.”  
  
“I was starting to despair, thinking I would never see either one of them again, when Roland appeared where I was out of nowhere. Robin got there soon after, and he told me I was in the future; his present.”  
  
“That must be why I never found them with the Merry Men. Even them had no idea where they had gone.”  
  
“Yes. I will let Robin tell you exactly what happened to him when he gets back.”  
  
Regina nodded, she was taking in all the new information. Sure, she hadn’t given it too much thought and energy once she had realized both father and son hadn’t been in the woods in Storybrooke and there was no actual way to track them down. She had still thought about whether she had done the right thing by sending a bird back to the Merry Men that day in the diner as they were flying away to get to Emma. She was glad it looked like it had all turned out for the best.  
  
At the sound of footsteps approaching, they both turned around to look at the door.  
  
“Regina!” Emma exclaimed, running over to her.  
  
She instinctively got on her feet and Emma enveloped her in a tight embrace.  
  
“I thought something had happened to you. I was so scared,” Emma said in one breath “When Robin showed up, I thought it was a trap. I almost chopped his head off.”  
  
“Then I saw Roland hiding behind him, and I couldn’t go through with it, even if it was a trap,” she finished, letting go of the hug.  
  
“I’m glad you are okay too.”  
  
“You,” said Emma and Marian at the same time as soon as they had turned around completely.  
  
“You two know each other?” asked Regina.  
  
“She is the stranger that helped me.”  
  
“You are the one that saved my Marian?” asked Robin, now sitting down next to his wife. He looked at her with so much love that Regina finally understood what was so different about him: he didn’t look as miserable as he always did since he had met him. He didn’t look like that at all, actually. That must be what happens when you are actually with the person you are supposed to be with; when you know the mother of your son is safe and sound next to you. She could definitely relate to that.  
  
“I suppose I am,” Emma said, hands deep in her jeans pockets.  
  
“Sit, sit,” Marian urged them.  
  
“I never got the chance to thank you for saving my life,” she said once they were both sitting down “so, thank you. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”  
  
“It was nothing, really.” She brought a hand to the back of her neck.  
  
“No, it was. My family and I will never thank you enough,” said Robin.  
  
“You are welcome,” she decided to concede before things got more awkward than they needed to be “how did you get here anyway?”  
  
“Robin was supposed to tell Regina,” said Marian.  
  
“Oh, yes. Of course.”  
  
“We were still in Camelot,” he started explaining “I was trying to locate you in the woods, when I found you standing next to a well. It looked like you had just seen a ghost.”  
  
Something in Regina clicked as he uttered those words. The more he recounted what had happened, the more she got her memory back as well.  
  


*********************************************************

  
  
Regina was still looking down at her own hand clinging to the stone well. Panic was rising up high inside her thinking about Emma disappearing with the dagger. She knew she had to go warn the others, she felt deep in her bone that something bad was about to happen, but fear was keeping her there. She was stuck there in place for a long while, until Hood calling for her had forced her to face him.  
  
“Regina? You alright?” he asked as he noticed her pale face.  
  
“How long have you been there?” she asked instead. She regained her composure in no time, standing up straight, her hand finally letting go of the well.  
“Just a couple of minutes. I wanted to talk to you.”  
  
“Now it’s not the time.”  
  
She started walking toward where she knew she would find Henry, the two idiots, and the others. She walked for a couple of minutes, aware that Robin was following her. He kept his distance, but she could still sense his presence behind her; she rolled her eyes at that.  
  
“I am leaving,” he said at last.  
  
“You are what?” she turned around on the spot and raised an eyebrow.  
  
“I am leaving,” he repeated “there is clearly no need for me to stick around anymore. I might as well go back to my son.”  
  
That was the most reasonable thing she had heard him saying since… the most reasonable thing she had ever heard him say ever. She still didn’t know how he was going to accomplish that; it had taken a lot of effort and research for them to get there in the first place.  
  
“How are you planning on doing that?” she asked curious.  
  
“I haven’t found a way yet. But I must go and seek it.”  
  
 Her mind was half listening to what he was telling her, while the other half was still too much focused on her worries. Thinking of everything that could go wrong form then on: Emma was clearly not herself when they had been talking before. She hadn’t been quite herself since they had found her there in Camelot, but even more so when she had gotten back from wherever she had gone with Merlin. She had felt just a hint of the old Emma only when their lips had met and only for that split second.  
  
“Regina? Are you listening to me?”  
  
“Did you say something?” she asked, bringing herself to the present.  
  
“I was wondering if that wand of yours you used to bring all of us here could help me get back to my boy.”  
  
“I can give it a try,” she said, hand ready to summon the object.  
  
“Weird,” she added after a couple more failed attempt.  
  
“What?”  
  
“I can’t seem to be able to get it.” She conjured a fireball in her hand, her go to quick way of checking her magic.  
  
“Is that going to help you find the wand?”  
  
“No, I was just checking if I still had my magic. Which I do. Something ins’t right here.”  
  
“Well, I am going to find a way back to Roland. One way or another.”  
  
He started walking away, Regina following him with his gaze until he disappeared from her line of sight.  
  


*********************************************************

  
“And that’s the last thing I remember of me being in Camelot,” he concluded.  
  
“Same goes for me,” said Regina.  
  
“You remember now?”  
  
“Yes. As soon as he started telling us the story, something clicked inside my head and I almost relived the whole thing.”  
  
“You okay?” asked Emma.  
  
Regina nodded, only now recalling the last feeling she had felt in that moment.  
  
“I did feel a bit dizzy as I was trying to check why my magic wasn’t working.”  
  
“Now that you mention it, I felt that too as I was walking away. Then the next thing I remember, I am in Storybrooke with my son and my Merry Men.”  
  
“How did you two find each other?” asked Emma “when I left you, you were still in the past.”  
  
Marian told her what she had told Regina, skipping the part where she felt like she was a step away from death. Roland was back in the room with them, and Emma was already fully aware of her conditions when the arrow had hit her.  
  
“Was there a blinding white light right before you got transported from Storybrooke to here?” Regina asked. Listening to the story again, she thought there might have been more to it than she had originally thought. People didn’t get transported to different realms like that without a reason; it wasn’t that easy traveling between realms in the first place.  
  
“Yes. How do you know?”  
  
“We have been experiencing something similar to that a lot lately,” answered Emma.  
  
“I have seen that same white light moments before Roland appeared in the tavern,” said Marian.  
  
“Not that I mind,” Regina started “but how did you get here, to my castle?”  
  
“It was my idea, actually,” said Robin “once we realized no one else was left in the Enchanted Forest, I remembered about our time here when I met you.”  
  
“I hope you don’t mind we invaded your home,” added Marian.  
  
“Not at all. This place was already abandoned, anyway. It hasn’t been my home in a long time now.”  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
“How are you two going back to Storybrooke now?” asked Roland, he had been listening to them carefully from his place next to his mother.  
  
“Good question, buddy. How are you going to do that?”  
  
“We do have our own way of getting back, which hasn’t failed us so far,” replied Regina, unsure whether to reveal how they actual got back. She had just realized that she didn’t know if it had been obvious her and Emma had been a couple. It must have been; they really didn’t hug when  Hood had been around, both before and during their time in Camelot.  
  
“Are you going to share a True Love kiss?” asked Roland, he must have heard all those ancient stories in the Enchanted Forest where the day was always saved by two people sharing a kiss.  
  
“Roland,” Marian scolded him “you can’t just ask people questions like that.”  
  
“No, it’s okay,” reassured Regina “that is exactly how we do it.”  
  
Roland broke into a smile at the answer. “See? I was right.”  
  
“I never said you weren’t, honey.”  
  
“Do you mind if we take a look outside before we do that?” asked Regina after an awkward sudden silence.  
  
“Of course not, this is still your realm after all.”

 

* * *

  
  
  
“That was weird, wasn’t it?” asked Emma as they were stepping outside in the sunny day. The fresh air filling their lungs.  
  
“Indeed,” Regina agreed.  
  
“Where are we going?”  
  
“I am not sure, I just needed to clear my head a bit. That was a lot to take in.”  
  
They walked in silence side by side for a long while, until they found themselves standing in the middle of a now dried-up Lake Nostos.  
  
“Look,” Emma said pointing at a random spot “that is exactly where your mother tried to rip my heart out.”  
  
Regina looked at her, nodding absently as she was still deep into her own thoughts.  
  
“Did you hear me?”  
  
“Yes, I did. Sorry. And sorry about Cora as well.”  
  
“Not your fault.”  
  
“Hey,” she added as she got closer.  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Is any of this,” she pointed at Regina’s still worried face “in any way connected to seeing Robin with Marian?”  
  
“Oh, Emma,” she stepped closer and took her hands in hers “of course not.”  
  
“Now that I got my stupid uncalled for jealousy out of my way, which I kinda started feeling when I found Robin earlier. Which is also the reason why I almost chopped the guy’s head off in the first place,” Emma said in one big breath.  
  
“Relax,” said Regina, circling her thumbs on her hands still in hers “that wasn’t stupid. I am sure I would have had the same reaction.”  
  
“What got you so worried then? Is it the fact that we still haven’t figure out what exactly is happening to us?”  
  
“Yes.” Regina looked down at their feet.  
  
“Hey,” Emma let go of her hands and put two fingers under Regina’s chin “you don’t have to carry all that worry on your own. I know we have had some months where we have almost forgotten about it all. But I promised you once that we were going to figure it out together, and we will.”  
  
“I know.”“Ready to go home?”  
  
‘Home’, just hearing the word come out her girlfriend’s mouth reassured her a bit more. She was indeed ready to go back to their home and curl up in bed.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
Emma tucked a few strands of Regina’s hair behind her ear. She cupped her face between her hands, thumb slowly tracing her bottom lip. Then, she leaned over and kissed her slowly and softly.


	18. Chapter 18

“Ugh,” said Emma as they found themselves once again sitting in the kitchen.  
  
Regina held a hand up and they both froze on the spot. They heard Henry talking to someone in his room. It wasn’t loud enough for them to hear what he was saying, just enough to know he was talking to someone else.  
  
“How long have we been gone?”  
  
“Two hours?” said Emma looking at the time on her phone “Has he been on Skype this long?”  
  
“Do you know who he is talking to?”  
  
“Nope. I have no clue. But I am sure he will tell us when he feels like it. He always does,” Emma reassured.  
  
“He does,” Regina smiled.  
  
“Ugh,” Emma started again what she was about to say before “my hot cocoa turned into a cold cocoa. No, extra cold cocoa.”  
  
“Do you want me to make you a new one?”  
  
“Nah, I got it.” Emma got up and took the mug to place it in the sink “want me to make you a tea?”  
  
“Yes, actually. Thank you.”  
  
“Ginger?”  
  
“Yes, please.”  
  
Five minutes or so later, after having used the microwave for both the tea and the hot cocoa, Emma sat down again.  
  
“You okay?” she asked. Regina still looked worried.  
  
“Yes, I am.” At Emma’s raised eyebrow she added: “I am still wrapping my head around the fact that I completely lost a whole chunk of memories from our time in Camelot. That conversation with Robin? Why didn’t I remember it? Why was it erased from my memory in the first place?”  
  
Regina already looked more relaxed after that. Venting to Emma always had that effect on her.  
  
“I have no clue. I wish I knew, believe me.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“We are going to figure it out eventually.”  
  
“I hate not knowing what is going on.”  
  
“I know you do.” said Emma in a soft voice “Are you going to get together with Belle to see if you can come up with something now that you know a little bit more?”  
  
“Yes. I am going to see if she can meet sometime tomorrow.”  
  
“Good! You need that.” Emma smiled “You know what else could be helpful to get your mind off things?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Tequila.”  
  
“Right now?”  
  
“On a school day? Regina,” she exclaimed, feigning shock “of course not.”  
  
“When were you thinking then?”  
  
“Saturday? The kid has that sleepover, doesn’t he?”  
  
“I see you have thought this through.” Regina replied with a smirk “Saturday sound good to me.”  
  
“You, me, and tequila. I can’t wait. It’s been too long.”  
  
“It has,” Regina said before yawning.  
  
“You tired?” Emma asked, yawning herself right after.  
  
“Looks like you are tired as well.”  
  
“Yeap. Bed as soon as we are done here?” She pointed at the mugs. “I gotta drink this hot cocoa now.”  
  
“Sure.” Regina smiled and took a sip of her tea.  
  
“Hey, Regina?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“I am glad you found out what happened to Roland, and that he is actually okay with his parents. I know how found you have always been of the little kid.”  
  
“I am glad too.”

 

* * *

  
  
  
“Hey,” said Belle, smiling widely as she saw Regina “how was your birthday?”  
  
It was midmorning the next day. She wanted to text or call her before to ask her if she had time to talk about recent events, when she remembered what Belle had told her. She had told her that she didn’t need to warn her before going to the library. She had been working full time at the library ever since Rumple had been able to get on his feet and manage the pawn shop on his own.  
  
“It was nice,” she replied “for the most part, at least.”  
  
“No!” Belle leaned over on the counter “Don’t tell me it happened again?”  
  
“It surely did. I still fell a bit tired after our recent unexpected traveling.”  
  
“How long has it been since the last time? Six months?”  
  
“Give or take, yes, six months.”  
  
Even though they hadn’t been transported anywhere since August, Regina and Belle had kept seeing each other on occasion. Sometimes they would still try to figure out what had caused everything that had happened to her and Emma, but for the most part they had just hung out; with or without their significant others. They had found they had quite a lot in common after all, and they enjoyed each other’s company.  
  
“Wow. What happened this time that got you so tired?”  
  
“It wasn’t anything tiring per se. It was mostly… a lot to take in.”  
  
“How come?”  
  
She told her everything; from finding out that Marian was alive, finding out what had happened to Robin and Roland, and finally not remembering a particular encounter had with Robin back in Camelot.  
  
“That’s odd,” Belle said at the end of it.  
  
“Quite disturbing, too,” Regina agreed “we have had memory losses before, more than I can count. This one time it was so… selective. And I still haven’t figured out why removing that particular memory was so important.”  
  
“Have you found anything regarding that?”  
  
“No.” Regina crossed her arms at the thought. “You? Have you found anything new recently?”  
  
“I did and I didn’t. There is only one thing I found that comes even closer to what you have been experiencing, but I seriously doubt that is your case.”  
  
“What is it?”  
  
“Well,” Belle started saying while reaching for a book in one of the drawers behind her “there is this case of this couple that has travelled to more realms, including some parallel universe, than anyone recorded has ever done before.”  
  
“Okay,” Regina said carefully “where they brought there by a mysterious force or where they going there on their own accord?”  
  
“I am afraid it is the second one. The couple wanted to, and I quote, experience intimacy in every possible realm they could reach.”  
  
“Intimacy?” Regina scoffed “When was this book written?”  
  
“Uhmm… let me see.” Belle turned a few pages into the book “Almost three centuries ago, I am afraid.”  
  
“That explains it. How did they move around so easily?”  
  
“I am pretty sure it said they used magic beans.” She opened the book on the previous page and nodded. “Yes, magic beans.”  
  
“No wonder why they become so rare at one point. I would love to see Rumple’s face when he hears that.”  
  
“I will tell him when I get home later tonight. I am surprised he didn’t know about it already, it is in one of the books he owned. I will let you know what he says.”  
  
“Yes, do that, please.”  
  
“I will.” Belle smiled. “Can we run through everything we know so far, so I don’t miss anything in my research.”  
  
Regina nodded. “We do know that we get transported at random moments of the day, wherever we are.”  
  
“Whether you are together or apart.”  
  
“Yes. One time Henry was with us, but for the most part it is just me and Emma.”  
  
“It happened once a month, except the first time and this last time. This time there was a six months break.”  
  
“Uh-huh. We always get to come back whenever a True Love kiss is shared. Only between me and Emma. Or in the case of Henry being with us, a kiss shared between us and our kid.”  
  
“And if someone else shares one in the realm you are in, it doesn’t affect you in any way or form. Did we miss anything?”  
  
“I don’t think so.” Regina furrowed her brows. “Wait, I noticed something different this last time.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Before we got poofed away, even before the blinding light, I got the tingling feeling a good minute before. It was as it was going in slow motion. I know Emma has felt it too.”  
  
“Something must be different, or changing.”  
  
“Yes, but what?”  
  
“I am sure we will figure out.”  
  
“That’s what Emma keeps telling me as well.”  
  
“And she is right. I agree with her.”

 

* * *

  
  
  
“Have you seen Robin in the Enchanted Forest?” asked Regina. It was the next Saturday, the one they had decided they would spend with their mutual friend tequila. Regina was clearly already tipsy.  
  
“Is this going to turn into a way to tell me you want to get back with your ex? ‘Cause I will get sick. I already feel sick.”  
  
“That’s because you have had 5 shots already.”  
  
“So, is it?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“The thing about your ex.” Emma rolled her eyes. “Don’t make me repeat it.”  
  
“Oh god no,” she pushed herself up a bit saying that. They were currently sitting on the floor in front of the couch in the living room.  
  
“Ooookay. What were you about to say?”  
  
“What was about to say?” repeated Regina “Oh, right, Robin.”  
  
“What about him?”  
  
“Did you see him in my castle? There was something different. Something was missing. Something…” she paused for a moment and closed her eyes.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Oh, I know the answer.”“Nobody asked you anything.” Emma laughed.  
  
“But I know the answer, don’t you want to hear it?” Regina pouted.  
  
“Of course I wanna hear it.” She nudged her. “Tell me.”  
  
“Okay, okay. The answer is: he didn’t look constipated anymore.”  
  
“Oh,” Emma squinted her eyes as if in deep though “you know I think you are right?”  
  
“Of course I am right.”  
  
“Cheers,” she said picking up her empty glass “wait, there is nothing here. Shot?”  
  
“Why not?” Regina replied, taking her own empty glass off the coffee table.  
  
“You should have seen him when he found himself in the diner when you were coming to get… No, when we were coming to get you in Camelot. Which we didn’t know it was going to be Camelot, but that is not the point.”  
  
“You didn’t bring him there? Like, on purpose?”  
  
“No. Of course not. I had just broken up with him.”  
  
“And how did he get there?” Emma leaned her head against the couch behind her.  
  
“He was already there.”  
  
“Oh? Doing what?”  
  
“If you stop interrupting me, I can tell you.”  
  
“I am not inter… I am not doing that. If you just tell me what was your point.”  
  
“Right,” she sighed and leaned her head against the couch as well, inches away from Emma’s “he was just then getting out of the bathroom, and he still looked so constipated.”  
  
“Have you ever thought that he was constipated?”  
  
“No, I haven’t. That’s tough.”  
  
“It is.”  
  
“But he didn’t look like that anymore. Ha, the power of True Love.”  
  
“True Love helps you against constipation?” Emma asked now with a serious face.  
  
“I don’t know.” Regina’s face matched Emma’s now. “It might as well, it is the most powerful magic of all.”  
  
“Fine by me. I wonder why you didn’t remember about the conversation you had with him in Camelot.”  
  
“Jeez, those were a lot of words,” she added immediately.  
  
“This is a very unique situation.”  
  
Emma started laughing at that. “Unique or maybe even special.”  
  
“What?”  
  
She started laughing even harder at her girlfriend’s confused tone.  
  
“I don’t get it.”  
  
“You don’t remember? Unique or maybe even special?”  
  
Regina started laughing as well at the memory, then she stopped, face even more serious than before. “Wait, why is that funny?”  
  
“Remember how I was trying to be friends back then? I was so obli-, damn I am drunk, oblivious to my feelings that I was so desperately trying to be your best friend.”  
  
“What’s so funny about that?”  
  
“Regina.”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“No, I was imitating myself back then.”  
  
“Oh!”  
  
“Yeah. ‘Regina, nobody in the whole world understands me like you do. The idea of losing you makes me not sleep at night. Be my bff, forever and ever?’”  
  
“If you put it that way.” Regina couldn’t stop herself from laughing this time, causing Emma to start laughing even more.  
  
And just as she was laughing so much out loud, Emma closed her eyes and sinked a bit more down into the floor.  
  
“Hey,’ Regina placed a hand on her shoulder and shook her “you still awake?”  
  
She opened her eyes again, looking straight into hers, and broke into song. “You are… my fire.”  
  
“Oh my god. Do you only know that one song?”  
  
“But you are my fire, Regina. My one desire.”  
  
“I am your fire, uh?”  
  
“Yes!”  
  
“Then sing me another song.”  
  
“Another song?” She tapped her index finger against her chin, until she didn’t start singing again. “Yo, I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want.”  
  
Regina raising her eyebrow, barely containing her laugher.  
  
“Come on, I know you know the song,” she protested.  
  
Then she repeated the first verse and pointed her index finger in Regina’s direction at the end of it.  
  
“So tell me what you want, what you really, really want,” she added, singing as well.  
  
“I knew you knew the song.” She started laughing even harder than she had done before.  
  
They spent the next half hour singing any possible 90s hit songs they could think of. That until Emma had cupped Regina’s face in her hands and looked her straight in the eye.  
  
“I wanna zigzag ah, Regina.”  
  
“The only thing we both need right now is get sleep.”  
  
“You are right. Bed?”  
  
“I am not moving from here, it’s too cozy.”  
  
“Magic?”  
  
“What about it?”  
  
“Use it to bring us to bed?”  
  
“Why me?”  
  
“Because,” Emma whined, leaning her head against Regina’s shoulder.  
  
“Great argument, you should be a lawyer.”  
  
“Tomorrow. I will do that tomorrow.”  
  
Regina chuckled quietly to herself, Emma was already starting to snore. She barely raised her hand to move themselves directly to their bed.  
  
“R-gina?” Emma whispered as her head hit the pillow.  
  
“You are still awake?”  
  
She nodded with her eyes closed, curled up on her side facing Regina. She extended her hand in the middle of the bed.  
  
As Regina brushed her fingertips over Emma’s palm, she was already snoring again.

 

* * *

  
  
They woke up almost simultaneously in the early hours of the morning, hands still in the middle of the bed barely brushing against one another.  
  
“How is my head not killing me right now?” Emma rubbed her eyes. “I usually can’t even keep my eyes open at this point.”  
  
“I used a spell for that.”  
  
“You never used a spell for hangovers before.”  
  
“We never drank that much before, either,” Regina pointed out.  
  
“You are right,” Emma said, rubbing again at her eyes “I sure am happy we didn’t found ourselves in the middle of another realm last night.”  
  
“It hasn’t been a month yet since the last time.”  
  
“Oh, yeah,” Emma chuckled “I forgot our own personal curse is on a schedule.”  
  
“You know? We never actually referred to it as a curse before. But that must be what is causing all this, isn’t it?”  
  
“Uh-huh.”  
  
“Are you drifting back to sleep again?”  
  
“Yeap.”  
  
Regina moved closer to her girlfriend, brought a hand to her back and started to slowly run her fingertips along her spine. “I guess we can still sleep a few more hours.”  
  
“Yeap,” Emma repeated as she brought her hand to casually rest on Regina’s side.  
  
  


* * *

 

  
  
“Hey, kid,” Emma nudged him “do you think we will convince your mom to get a pool this year?”  
  
“You are an adult, why don’t you pay for it?” He looked at her. “You are even more qualified for your job now, have you given yourself a raise yet?”  
  
“Haha you are funny. And I still don’t know how my last test went, anyway.”  
  
“But why can’t you get us a pool?”  
  
“Do you think I can make such a big change to this house without your mom agreeing first?”  
  
“I guess you are right,” he pouted.  
  
“You know I can hear you two?” Regina said looking up at them.  
  
They were out in the backyard, it was an unusual warm Sunday in early March, and Regina was tending to her flowers. Emma and Henry had decided to join her, and they were just standing there looking at what she was doing.  
  
“We know you can hear us, my Queen.”  
  
Regina smiled, and went back to the roses in front of her.  
  
“If you start with the mushy stuff, I will go back inside.”  
  
“No,” they both exclaimed at the same time.  
  
“Mom?” he said after a while, pushing his hands deep into his pockets.  
  
“Yes, sweetheart?”  
  
“Where is the table we usually have in the yard?”  
  
“Attic, why?”  
  
“I am kinda gettin tired of standing here.”  
  
“Give me a second, I am almost done here.”  
  
After a couple of minutes, Regina got up, removing her gardening gloves. She placed them in a basket with the rest of her gardening tools. She flicked her hand and the table Henry had mentioned appeared in between them.  
  
“Finally,” he said sitting down.  
  
Regina sat down as well, thinking she needed something to drink after all the work she had done. As if reading her mind, or maybe her expression, Emma magicked some iced tea on the table.  
  
“Thank you,” Regina said grateful, taking a sip from the already filled glass in front of her.  
  
“You are welcome, m-“ she stopped as she noticed the annoyed expression on Henry’s face.  
Henry took a big gulp out of his own glass, then took a big breath.  
  
“Hey, moms?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Is it okay if I bring my girlfriend over for dinner next week?” He looked down at his own hands.  
  
“Of course you can,” said Regina, sharing a look with his other mother.  
  
“Yeah, kid. Bring her over.”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Yes. Is that the same person you have been Skyping with for a while now?”  
  
“If you must know,” he almost blushed “yes, it is her.”  
  
“What’s her name?”  
  
“June.”  
  
“Pretty name,” said Emma.  
  
“Very pretty,” Regina agreed smiling, seeing a bit of embarrassment still on her son’s face “Is she from the Enchanted Forest?”  
  
“Nope.” He shook his head no. “She is from here. I mean, this world. Her and her parents got here shortly after you were finally able to lift the protection preventing outsiders to enter Storybrooke.”  
  
“Oh? Where is she from?” asked Emma.  
  
“New Hampshire?”  
  
“Oh no,” exclaimed Emma, sensing it first this time.  
  
“Sweetheart!”  
  
“What?” He asked looking from one to the other.  
  
“Lock yourself in-,” Regina said, her sentence cut off by both her and Emma poofing away.  
  
“Moms?” Henry cried out, getting on his feet.   
  
“Okay, I know now you haven’t done this on purpose, but you gotta love the irony,” he said to literally no one as he was walking to the backdoor. He quickly got to the study, using the blood magic protection as Regina had instructed him. He then sank down on the couch, wondering where his moms had gone to.  
  



	19. Chapter 19

The first thing Regina did as she found herself in yet another realm was going through her now usual routine: she tried poofing herself somewhere else, preferably were her family was. When that didn’t work, she tried summoning something that belonged to Emma, this time she was sure Henry hadn’t been poofed away as well. To her surprise, Emma’s red leather jacket appeared in her hands. She smiled pleased, and magicked it so it would bring her to her girlfriend. She followed it through familiar woods, until she found herself face to face with Emma.  
  
“Hey,” she protested as she saw the item of clothing glowing between them “I was wearing that.”  
  
“Sorry,” Regina picked it up in her hand as the magic faded away and handed it to her “it was the first thing I could thing of. I wasn’t sure it would work, as usual.”  
  
“So, we have magic now?”  
  
“Looks like it.”  
  
“And we remember each other?”  
  
“Yes. And Henry was at home. I noticed he wasn’t being poofed away at the same we were.”  
  
“Right.” Emma nodded. “What’s the deal here?”  
  
“Where are we anyway?” she added.  
  
“You didn’t recognize these woods yet?”  
  
“Oh, yes. I recognize that tree, it’s my favorite,” she said pointing at a random one at her left.  
  
“Emma, focus!”  
  
“Okay, okay,” she looked around for a split second then widened her eyes “I do recognize that tree, I think. We are back in Camelot, aren’t we?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“I have no idea.”  
  
“You don’t think we should try getting home just yet, right?”  
  
“I don’t think so. There must be a reason why we got back here.”  
  
“Let’s go figure it out together?”  
  
“Let’s,” Regina agreed.  
  
“Should we split up?” she asked after a bit.  
  
“What?” Emma stopped in her tracks and looked at her.  
  
“I meant right now. Not split up as in break up.”  
“You scared me for a moment there,” said Emma brining a hand to her chest.  
  
“I can see that. So, what do you think?”  
  
“I’d rather keep walking with you. I kinda don’t feel comfortable leaving you alone. Or being alone, for what that matters. This place freaks me out a little now.”  
  
“Okay,” Regina agreed “this place gives me chills too.”  
  
“Poor kid, we were once again in the middle of a conversation with him.”  
  
“True. Hope he remembered the potion I left for him.”  
  
“I’m sure he did.”  
  
They walked the rest of the way in silence. It wasn’t the ideal, nothing about the situation they were in was, but they didn’t feel the need to talk all the time when they were together. They had learned to just enjoy the other’s company over the months they had been together. Living together had helped with that as well.  
  
“Where is it?”  
  
“What?” Emma looked at the same spot Regina was looking at. “Oh, the castle?”  
  
“Yes. I am sure it was standing where that house is now.”  
  
“Do you think we travelled back in time?” Emma asked, half worried half excited “Or maybe the future?”  
  
“Only one way to find out.” She started walking toward the house.  
  
“You really want to knock at that door and see  who answers you?”  
  
“Yes. Why not?”  
  
“Because it could be literally anyone.”  
  
“Scared?”  
  
“A little bit, yeah,” Emma admitted “aren’t you?”  
  
“Yes, of course. But we need to get to the bottom of it sooner rather than later.”  
  
“If you put it that way.” She got closer to the other woman standing in front of the house.   
  
“Wait,” she added as Regina was raising her hand.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Got your magic ready if we need to use it?”  
  
Regina nodded, and lightly knocked on the door. A few moments later it opened.  
  
“Emma? Regina?” said Lancelot.  
“Lancelot? Are we in the future?” Emma asked.  
  
“Excuse me?”  
  
“How long has it been since we left this place?” Regina asked instead. It was obvious they weren’t in the past because he wouldn’t have called her by her first name.  
  
“It’s been almost a year.”  
  
“Present then.”  
  
“What brings you back here?”  
  
“We still haven’t figured that out ourselves. We were hoping to find some clues here.”  
  
“What happened to the castle?”  
  
“You helped us get rid of it,” said Lancelot looking at Regina “you don’t remember about it?”  
  
“Apparently I don’t. It’s not the first time it has happened with a memory connected to this place.”  
  
“Come on in,” he said, holding the door open for them “we’ll try to see if we can help you jog your memory.”  
  
“We?” asked Emma.  
  
“Yes, me and Guinevere.”  
  
Lancelot closed the door behind them at the same time as said woman was walking down the stairs. “Darling? Who was at the door?”  
  
“Oh, I never thought I’d see you two back here again,” she said as she noticed the other two women in the house.  
  
“We never thought we’d be back either.”  
  
“I see you are no longer the Dark One.”  
  
“No, that is all behind us now.”  
  
“Good for you.”  
  
They were now following the couple in front of a fireplace, where they all sat down.  
  
“You Majesty,” started Regina, only to be interrupted by Guinevere’s raised hand.  
  
“It is just Guinevere now. You can call me that. I let go of my title, alongside everything else.”  
  
“Guinevere,” Regina started again “what happened to your castle?”  
  
The former Queen instinctively looked at Lancelot at her side with a puzzled expression.  
  
“It seems like she has no memory of it.”  
  
“I will try to recall as many details as possible from your time here. What do you remember exactly?”  
  
“Regarding you two,” said Regina “I only remember King Arthur was up to something. But there is a big blur in my mind.”  
  
“Okay,” said Guinevere before starting to recall as much as possible.  
  
Emma instinctively reached for Regina’s hand and intertwined their fingers together. And just as it had happened with Robin Hood before, the moment Guinevere had started talking, something in Regina’s mind clicked causing her to get a vivid memory of something that had happened in that same place almost a year before.

  
  
*********************************************************

  
Regina was sitting on the same rock she had been sitting that first night in Camelot. She had spent the entire morning inside Granny’s with Belle, going over several books to figure out how to get Emma back without using the dagger. After several hours of doing only that, she had needed a break to clear her head; the other woman was still inside.  
  
“May I?” asked Guinevere approaching her.  
  
Regina nodded, gesturing toward the empty space at her side.  
  
“Thank you again for helping me break free of Arthur’s spell once and for all.”  
  
“It was my pleasure,” Regina replied “How are you feeling? When I left the tw- When I left Snow and Charming they were still a bit loopy.”  
  
“I am fine, thank you. I think after all these years of being affected by the same spell, my body got used to the pink dust he kept throwing at me.”  
  
“I apologize for not being able to stop Arthur as well. He got away before I could do anything.”  
  
“You have done plenty for me already. I now know what kind of man I was dealing with.”  
  
Regina looked up at the clear sky, and sighed involuntarily.  
  
“Worried about your Emma?” she asked following her gaze “Still no sign of her anywhere?”  
  
“No, nothing.” Regina looked down now. “And I don’t think ‘my Emma’ is quite exact.”  
  
“From what Snow has told me, I have to disagree.”  
  
“Excuse me?” Regina looked up and in her direction “What exactly did Snow tell you?”  
  
“She told me how Emma didn’t even think twice about taking in the darkness in your place.”  
  
“She is the Savior, it is in her job description.”  
  
“I must disagree again,” said Guinevere “I have had a similar experience to back that up.”  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“Yes. It was not long before Arthur decided to keep me under his control. I was with Lancelot, he was Arthur’s most trusted knight back then and he always insisted on him following me anywhere. We got closer and closer the more time we spent together, while Arthur obsessed over his fake kingdom.”  
  
“We were walking alone in the woods one day, I can’t even recall what we were doing exactly. But we were walking, and out of nowhere comes this big vortex of evil. I could feel the evil in my very bones. Before I realized what was happening, it was taking a hold of Lancelot. I thought he was about to die, when I tried to burn the thing with the torch in my hand. Somehow it worked. And that was when I fully realized how strong my feelings for him where. I had had my suspicions before, but that made it clear in my mind.”  
  
“You are in love with Lancelot?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“And Lancelot is…?”  
  
“Lancelot is in love with me, too. I am sure that was the reason why Arthur started to use the pink dust on me in the first place, to keep us apart. He must have found out through some of his other knights he had sent to spy on us. He knew by then that our marriage hadn’t been working for years. He still needed to keep up appearance with the people; a fake relationship to go along with a fake kingdom.”  
  
“Where is Lancelot now?”  
  
“He is back where the kingdom used to be. He said he wants to build us a house there. It is where we met. And it is a good reminder of what we had to go through to be together.”  
  
“Do you need a hand with that? I could use my magic to help you build it.”  
  
“If it isn’t too much trouble.”  
  
“Of course it isn’t.”  
  
“Awww isn’t it romantic?”  
  
“Arthur?” Guinevere said as both her and Regina jumped on their feet “What are you doing here?”  
  
“Did you think I’d let you go only because a witch figured out what was going on?”  
  
Regina stepped closer to him, fireball ready in hand.  
  
“Do you think some fire will work on me?”  
  
“Leave her alone,” said Guinevere “you have a problem with me, not with her.”  
  
“She has become a problem for me the moment she mingled in my own business. I will get to you soon enough.”  
  
Regina threw her fireball at him, but it didn’t hit him. Not even close. It stopped a few feet before him, and then dropped on the floor, extinguishing itself just like that. Arthur must have come prepared with a protection spell all around himself.  
  
He raised his hand, pink dust ready to blow in Regina’s face, when Emma appeared between them. With a flick of her hand she sent the pink dust still in midair flying backward and into his own face. A moment later the rest of the dust still in the small pouch he was carrying followed suit. He dropped on his knee, hands to his face.  
  
“Emma,” exclaimed Regina, causing the other woman to turn around and face her “you are back.”  
  
“Be more careful next time,” she replied coldly, her face as pale as ever.  
  
“Where have you been?” Regina kept asking questions, even when she saw in Emma’s face that she wasn’t about to give her any answers.  
  
“I need to go.” She was poofing herself away before she could say anything else; she did noticed though that her face had soften up considerably as she was disappearing in front of her eyes.  
  
“What is happening to him?” asked Guinevere bringing her back to what was happening: Arthur was falling flat on the ground now, face first.  
  
She quickly rushed over to him and checked his pulse.  
  
“I think all that dust at once turned him mad, and ultimately killed him. I can’t feel a pulse.”  
  
Guinevere got on her knees as well, and checked for herself to be sure. “Is it wrong that I am relieved?”  
  
“After all he has done to you over the years, and tried to do to you just now, I think you have every right to be.”  
  
“Regina!” Belle came rushing out of the diner, book in her hands, making Regina think there were rarely a slow moment in that realm.  
  
“What happened to him?” she asked as she noticed the body on the ground.  
  
“He got what he deserved,” replied Guinevere.  
  
“Oh?”  
  
“I’ll explain later. Did you want to show me something?”  
  
“Yes,” Belle said, finally looking away from the body “remember how Emma had to use both your tear and Henry’s to free Merlin?”  
  
“I do, why?”  
  
“I just came across this,” she opened the book and pointed at one of the pages “it basically says that in order for the potion to work, you have to use your True Love’s tear, given to you willingly.”  
  
“It does?” Regina took the book from her hands and started reading from it. “It does.”  
  
Belle nodded at that. Guinevere looked at her with a ‘I told you so as well’ written all over her face.  
  
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t questioning you. I just… how did Emma know it would work with mine?”  
  
“It’s okay. And I am going on a hunch here, but maybe she used Henry as well in case yours didn’t work?”  
  
“Or to be sure it worked?” She leaned over and pointed at the bottom of the page. “Here, it says that if you share True Love with multiple people, you have to use as many tears as possible to strengthen the position.”  
  
“As long as they are given willingly,” repeated Regina.  
  
“Exactly.”

  
  
*********************************************************

  
  
“Then I left you to meet Lancelot exactly here, where this house is standing now,” concluded Guinevere “that was the last time I saw you.”  
  
“I remember now too,” said Emma. She squeezed Regina’s hand in hers.  
  
“You had no recollection of any of this happening until now?”  
  
“Nope.”  
  
“Someone or something does really not want you to know the whole story,” said Lancelot.  
  
“I’m sorry I don’t have any more details of your time here after that.”  
  
“No need to apologize,” said Regina “you have given us more than enough.”  
  
“I wonder if my parents remember anything.”  
  
“I am pretty sure they were walking around to get some fresh air after I lifted the spell Arthur had put on them. I think Henry was with them, he wanted to keep an eye on his grandparents.”  
  
“We’ll have to ask them when we get home.”  
  
“Do you have a magic bean?” asked Lancelot “because I haven’t come across one in ages.”  
  
“No, usually a True Love’s kiss helps us get back.”  
  
“A True Love’s kiss?” “Usually? How many times has that happened to you before?” asked Lancelot and Guinevere respectively.  
  
“Yes, True Love kiss has been the only thing that has worked before,” Regina replied, then turned to face Emma “this is the… seventh time, right?”  
  
“In less than a year?”  
  
“Yeap,” replied Emma, answering to both at the same time.  
  
“I don’t know how you two keep it up,” said Guinevere before looking lovingly at Lancelot “but then again, I know what it is like when someone is trying to keep you away from your True Love.”  
  
“Dad was right when he said True Love wasn’t easy, but it might be fought for.”  
  
“Charming said that?”  
  
“Uh-huh.”  
  
“How are Snow and Charming?” he asked “And the baby? I wish I had met him the last time we saw each other, even though the circumstances weren’t the most ideal. I still remember the day of their wedding.”  
  
“They are all good, thank you.”  
  
Regina lost herself in her own head, her thought coming back to one thing in particular. She missed the entire conversation they were having about Emma’s parents and everyone else the three of them knew.  
  
“I’m sure we have overstayed our welcome,” she said suddenly.  
  
One look at her and Emma agreed. “Yeah, I think it is time for us to go.”  
  
“You didn’t,” said Guinevere “but I am sure you want to get back to your son as soon as possible.”  
  
“Exactly,” said both Emma and Regina at the same time.  
  
“And I am sure you want your own privacy to get back home?” Lancelot said it more as a question than a statement.  
  
“I think that would work better for us,” Regina said smiling.

 

* * *

 

  
  
“It took me a moment there to try and understand what was going on in your head, but…” started Emma as they were leaving the house.  
  
“But?” Regina arched an eyebrow.  
  
“But I think you want to see if the Apprentice’s wand has been left behind,” Emma said in one breath “unless I got it all wrong.”  
  
“No, no. That is exactly what I was thinking. I kept coming back to the fact that in that other memory I recently got I couldn’t summon it at all.”  
  
“And you didn’t find it anywhere back in Storybrooke.”  
  
“Exactly. So, I was thinking maybe if we find it here…”  
  
“… maybe we can find each other more easily if and when this thing happens again?” finished Emma. Then added: “Wow. That was kinda freaky. Remember what your doubleganger said about us doing that?”  
  
“I do,” Regina chuckled “How long have we been doing that?”  
  
“I have no idea.”  
  
“Me neither.”  
  
When they were far away enough from the house they had just left, not wanting to disturb them in case something backfired, Regina opened her hand in front of her. She then closed her eyes and tried to summon the wand to her.  
  
Several minutes and attempts later, Emma placed a hand on her arm. “Do you need help?” she asked, letting go of the arm almost immediately.  
  
“No, wait. Put your hand there again,” Regina said, eyes still closed.   
  
As Emma did just that, they both felt their combined magic rushing through them. It was almost the same feeling they had felt with the hat, but amplified.  
  
“Wow,” said Emma as the Apprentice’s wand appeared in Regina’s hand “I guess True Love is good for more than just curing constipation.”  
  
“You are never going to let that slide, are you?”  
  
“Never.” She winked at her.  
  
“Can we go home now? I am hungry.”  
  
“When are you not hungry?”  
  
“I don’t know. Your jokes make me burn more calories than usual… Miss Swan.”  
  
“Are we back at the Miss Swan now?” Emma was already wrapping her arms around her waist.  
  
“Be careful or it will turn into ‘The Charmings’ spawn’ again.” Regina grinned.  
  
“Are you going to kiss me or not?”  
  
“You are lucky I love kissing you too much or this whole situation would have become boring a long time ago.” With that, without waiting for a reply, she got on her tiptoes and kissed her passionately.


	20. Chapter 20

When they found themselves back in the back yard, they didn’t waste anytime before they poofed themselves in front of the study. They would have poofed themselves directly inside it, but didn’t want to scare their son.  
  
“Henry? Sweetheart?” Regina knocked on the closed door, she didn’t want to barge in for the same reason.  
  
“Kid?”  
  
After a minute or so, he finally opened the door.  
  
“Were you sleeping?”  
  
“Yeah, when did you get back?”  
  
“Just now. How long have we been gone this time?”  
  
“Couple of hours, maybe?” he said scratching a spot on his leg “I got bored. And worried. But mostly bored.”  
  
“That’s okay. We didn’t mean to scare you,” said Regina placing a hand on his shoulder.   
  
“I know.”  
  
“Do you want to go back to sleep?”  
  
He nodded as he yawned. He tried to make his way back to the study, when Emma grabbed him by the shoulders.  
  
“Upstairs.”  
  
“Fine.” He yawned again.  
  
They directed him upstairs and tucked him into bed.  
  
“I want to know everything that happened to you,” he said in a sleepy voice.  
  
“When you wake up.”  
  
“Promise?”  
  
“Promise,” both his moms said at the same time.  
  
“He looked so small. Not that he is an adult now,” said Emma as they were walking down the stairs.  
  
“I know what you mean.”  
  
“Still hungry?”  
  
“Yes, you?”  
  
“Starving,” Emma replied “let’s go see if anything else came out from your cooking and baking lessons?”  
“Sure, lead the way.”  
  
“You know what Guinevere and Lancelot made me realize?” asked Regina later as Emma was moving around the kitchen.  
  
“What?”  
  
“We never really talked about your sacrifice. The sacrifice you made for me.”  
  
“We haven’t?” Emma tilted her head in her direction.  
  
“No. Not that I recall. I never got the chance to actually thank you.”  
  
“I am pretty sure we are way past that at this point.”“I know. I just…” Regina stopped, she was lost for words.  
  
“I know what you mean, you don’t have to say anything.” Emma smiled and went back to her cooking.  
  
“You do?”  
  
“Yes. How many times have you sacrificed yourself one way or another? I never found the way to properly thank you. Or not enough.”  
  
“What are you talking about?”  
  
“Do you want me to make you a list?”  
  
“If you don’t mind, yes.” Regina bit her lower lip.  
  
“That is so typical of you, by the way.” Emma chuckled.  
  
“What is?”  
  
“Not taking credit for helping others. You are more a hero than I am, if we are being honest.”  
  
“So?” Regina looked almost embarrassed now. Almost.  
  
“So?”  
  
“That list you mentioned?”  
  
“Okay, let’s see,” she said, stirring something in a pot before going to sit next to Regina “there is that time at the Mines, when you were trying to diffuse the trigger all on your own.”  
  
“Does it count even if it was there because of me?”  
  
“Of course it does. All you wanted in return was for Henry to see you as who you are, not the worst part of yourself,” Emma said in a serious tone “I was obviously not done yet.”  
  
“There was that time with the Chernabog when you poofed yourself out of the car as a bait for it.”  
  
“I thought he was after me, the heart of the darkest potential.”  
  
“Which turned out to be me,” pointed out Emma “see? you are doing it again now.”  
  
“What am I doing?”  
  
“Not taking credit for anything heroic you have done.”  
  
“Someone else would say idiotic.”  
  
Emma laughed. “Then you would fit right in with the Charming clan.”  
  
“I… hadn’t thought of that. I am doomed.” She gasped at the thought.  
  
“No, you are not. Can I finish my list?”  
  
“There is more?”  
  
“Of course there is. When you made possible for me and Snow to come back from the Enchanted Forest.”  
  
“I almost didn’t do it.” Regina bit the inside of her cheek stopping herself from arguing more.  
  
“But you did, didn’t you? Henry told me how much magic you took in.”  
  
“That is true.”  
  
“See? It’s not that hard. And I am sure there are more example, but I have to mention the hardest one of all.”  
  
“Which is?”  
  
“When you had to let go of Henry, of the thing you love most, not knowing when or if you would see him again.”  
  
“That was indeed the hardest thing I have ever done.”  
  
“And I never really thanked you for that. For the memories you have given me. The life you have tried to give us, even if you weren’t in Henry’s anymore. I could never put into words how grateful I am for that, even if I tried.”  
  
“I think you just did.” Regina cupped Emma’s face between her hands, thumbs slowly brushing against her cheeks.  
  
“I guess you are right. Still… thank you.” She leaned over and placed a soft kiss on her lips.  
  
“You are welcome.” Regina smiled into the kiss.  
  
“You know what I have always wanted to ask you, but never got the courage to do so?” Emma got on her feet to go check on the food.  
  
“Regarding what?”  
  
“That last one.”  
  
“Oh? What is it?”  
  
“I always wondered… you know how when you held the scroll in your hands you fainted for a moment there?”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“What did you see there? I know you later said you had to give up the thing you loved the most, but I was wondering… what exactly did you see? If you saw anything, that is.”  
  
“Well, I remember getting a glimpse of you and Henry driving off, over the town line.”  
  
“You did?”  
  
“Yes.” Regina got up and joined the other next to the kitchen top “I remember thinking you were in the vision as well because you were the Savior, Henry’s other mother.”  
  
“But?”  
  
“But I don’t think that was what I was looking at.” She took a deep breath, she had thought about telling her that exact thing a lot during the year back in the Enchanted Forest. She had thought about telling Emma that since she had realized what her short vision might have actually meant. “I think what I was looking at was the thing I loved, and still love, the most. It was never a person… it was the family I have found in you and Henry.”  
  
“Wow.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“That is very deep, Regina.”  
  
“Are you mocking me?”  
  
“I would never. Not when it comes to something like that.”  
  
“Thank you.”  
  
“You know? I think it makes sense what you just said. It always comes down to you and the kid for me, too.”  
  
“You do?”  
  
“Yes. I only saw memories of you and Henry when I was taking the darkness in.”  
  
“Wow. You two are cheesy,” said Henry getting into the kitchen.  
  
“Hey, kid. Are you hungry?” She purposely ignored his remark.  
  
“Are you cooking?” he asked scrunching his nose.  
  
“Yeah. Got a problem with that?”  
  
“No, of course not.”  
  
“You better not.”  
  
He stuck his tongue out at her as he sat down at one of the stools.  
  
Regina got close and combed his bed hair with her fingers. “Did you have a good nap, my Little Prince?”  
  
“Yeah. Are you going to tell me what happened to you two?”  
  
“As soon as we sit down for dinner.”  
  
“Which will be?”  
  
“Ten minutes?” said Emma.  
  
“I will be in the other room watching tv.” He got up and walked out of the kitchen.  
  
“We really do have a teenager on our hands, don’t we?”  
  
“Indeed, we do.”  
  


* * *

  
  
  
There was a light knock on her office’s door before Andrew put his head around it.  
  
“Madam Mayor, are you busy?” he asked “Miss French is here to see you.”  
  
“Let her in, please.”  
  
Belle got inside, trying to refrain some laughter. “He called me Mrs Gold when he saw me. I wasn’t even aware of the fact that I had taken my husband’s last name over night?”  
  
“He is formal like that, just ignore him.”  
  
“Did you know he lived a few houses away from my own growing up?”  
  
“I did not know that.”  
  
“And now he calls me Mrs Gold. Unbelievable.” Belle sat down on the chair in front of Regina’s desk.  
  
“I was actually going to pass by the library during my lunch hour. You saved me a trip,” she said, placing her pen down “What do I owe the pleasure?”  
  
“Last night I got a brand new memory from our time in Camelot?!”  
  
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You must have gotten that back as I was remembering it. We found ourselves back there yesterday.”  
  
“You did?”  
  
“Yes. Emma got some memories back as well.”  
  
“Wow. That is quite the domino effect we have got going on.”  
  
“It is. It seems like we are getting closer to figuring out what is happening though.”  
  
“That’s true. Have you found out anything else that could be useful? Our list hasn’t gotten any longer.”  
  
“Remember how I told you I couldn’t summon the Apprentice’s wand to me while in Camelot?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“We found it yesterday. It was still in Camelot. If we get lost again, we can use it to track each other.”  
  
“Good thinking.”  
  
“Hopefully it will pay off one way or another.”  
  
“I hope so, too. I will keep looking through books and online as well.”  
  
“Thank you, Belle.”  
  
“There was another reason why I came here this morning. I would like to share something with you.”  
  
Regina leaned a bit more on the desk to show her she was interested in hearing what she had to tell her.  
  
“Show you, actually. May I?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
Belle opened her handbag and got an envelope from it; she handed it to Regina.  
  
“You are pregnant?” she asked after she opened it.  
  
“Yes. We just got back from the first ultrasound.” Belle smiled widely.  
  
“You did? I am really happy for you, Belle.”  
  
“Thank you!”  
  
“How is Rumple taking it in?”  
  
“He is trilled. He is already coming up with different baby names. But he also feeling a bit guilty, he feels as if he is replacing Baelfire with another child. Which I assured him he isn’t.”  
  
“That kind of feeling is understandable when you have lost a child, I am sure.”  
  
“I know. He does miss him a lot.”  
  
“I am sure he does. Henry does miss his father as well.”  
  
“Anyway,” she added, shaking her head “yours are wonderful news. I really am happy for you two.” Regina smiled softly.

 

* * *

  
  
Regina got home that night with a smile on her face. She followed the good smell coming from the kitchen where she found Emma at the kitchen island.  
  
“Hey, you are home.”  
  
“Hey,” Regina said back. She walked around the island, placed a soft kiss on Emma’s cheek. She then wrapped her arms around her waist from behind, her chin resting on her shoulder.  
  
“Someone is in a good mood,” pointed out Emma, placing her own arms over Regina’s.  
  
“I know something you don’t know,” she said in a singsong voice. It was a mere imitation of what her girlfriend had done to her every time  she knew something before she did.  
  
“Oh? Do tell.” Emma turned herself around in her arms, curiosity written all over her face.  
  
“Are you gonna be like this when June comes over?” Henry said, making them both jump on the spot “please, tell me you aren’t going to be.”  
  
“Kid, she was about to tell me something.”  
  
“Something good?” he squinted his eyes at his mom, then directed his attention to the fridge. He needed a glass of water.  
  
“Yes, it is something good.”  
  
“So? I am not getting any younger here.”  
  
“That is pretty much evident to everyone.” Henry stood there, waiting for whatever Regina had to share with them.  
  
“Shush. Don’t distract me from the moment.”  
  
Regina waited a few more seconds knowing full well how it drove Emma crazy.  
  
“Belle is pregnant. She came by the office to tell me this morning.”  
  
“She is? That is great.”  
  
“I am going to have another uncle? Nice.”  
  
“I suppose you are, yes. I hadn’t thought of that.”  
  
“What am I going to be to the baby?” Emma asked excited.  
  
“Nothing?”  
  
“Thanks, kid. I can always count on you for encouragement.”  
  
“You asked.” He took a final sip of his water and placed the glass on the kitchen island to use later for dinner.  
  
“He isn’t wrong, I am afraid.”  
  
“It’s not fair when it is you two against me. I am only one.” She pouted.  
  
“I am sure they won’t mind having the child call you ‘aunt Emma’ or something along those lines.”  
  
“That’s better.”  
  
“You two can go back to whatever it was I interrupted before. Call me when it is time to set the table.”  
  
Emma wrapped her arms around Regina again and placed a soft kiss on her lips.  
  
“Why don’t you go get changed while I finish up with the dinner?”  
  
“I was actually hoping to talk to you for a moment,” she said, placing her arms loosely around her neck “before Henry gets back.”  
  
“Sure,” Emma narrowed her eyes, and whispered “what’s up? is it a secret?”  
  
Regina laughed at that and shook her head no.  
  
“What is it then?”“Have you ever thought about having another baby?”  
  
“Me? As in me personally giving birth to another kid?”  
  
“Not necessarily.”  
  
“Okay, good,” she said letting out a sigh of relief “because I am not too found of the idea.”  
  
“Fair enough.”  
  
“But I have thought about other options.”  
  
“You have?” Regina couldn’t stop herself from smiling asking that.  
  
“Yeah. I mean… I always saw myself adopting a kid if I ever found the right woman to build a family with. We already have Henry, so that was different. And I didn’t know how you felt about the idea.”  
  
“I hand’t really thought about that much before, but today, after seeing how happy Belle was. I don’t know, I started thinking more and more about it.”  
  
“What is it?” Emma asked, sensing uncertainty in her voice.  
  
“Hypothetically, do you think us adopting another child would make Henry think we are replacing him?”  
  
“Would you do that to replace him?”  
  
“Of course not. I would want Henry to have a sister or a brother.”  
  
“There you go, you got your answer.”  
  
“You are right.”  
  
“Are you seriously taking it into consideration?”  
  
“Only if you are on board.”  
  
“We can keep discussing it.”  
  
Regina placed her head on Emma’s shoulder and nuzzled her neck.  
  
“Are we going to be able to keep it cool when Henry brings his girlfriend over?”  
  
“I am not sure we will,” Regina replied before kissing her neck.  
  
“Not if you do that.”  
  
“He’ll get over it… eventually.”  
  


 

* * *

  
  
  
“Why didn’t we have a double date like this before?” asked Snow as they were walking out of Granny’s.  
  
It was a Friday, and they had just had dinner just the four of them. They had planned a dinner and a movie, something they had never done before. Surprisingly, the dinner had been very pleasant for everyone present.  
  
Emma shrugged as she walked between Snow and Regina.  
  
“No idea,” said Charming. He was besides his wife and was now massaging his stomach “I ate so much, I feel like I am about to burst.”  
  
“Tell me about it,” agreed Emma, rubbing her own stomach.  
  
“Was it necessary for you two to order that extra plate of cheesy fries?”  
  
“Yes. Of course it was,” exclaimed Emma, then leaned behind her to high five her father “they were to die for.”  
  
“As long as we are not being too literal,” Regina said, crossing her arms.  
  
“Come on.” Emma placed a arm around her shoulders. “It was just a joke.”  
  
“What movie are we going to see again?” Regina asked to change the subject, while placing her own arm around Emma’s waist.  
  
“Zootopia,” Snow answered her “I heard it is a great movie. It took a whole month to get to Storybrooke, though.”  
  
“I told you.” Regina rolled her eyes. “This family and animated movies… it is unbelievable.”  
  
“Still denying that you love them too?” Emma teased her.  
  
“I never denied it. Would it make you that happy if, and I put emphasis on the if, I say that I do not mind them?”  
  
“Yes!” It was Snow replying this time.  
  
“Yeah, Regina. You can just admit your love for them,” added Charming.  
  
“Charming, not you too. I thought you were on my side.”  
  
“I was?” he asked scratching his head.  
  
“Well… I thought you weren’t as much of a lost cause as these two over here when it came to this particular subject.”  
  
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I can’t back you up on that.”  
  
“Well, then. I am not going to admit it. Ever.”  
  
“You kinda just did anyway.”  
  
“Did not.”  
  
“You so did.”  
  
“That doesn’t count. I explicitly told you I was putting emphasis on the if. It was all hypothetical.”  
  
“Are you two always like this?” asked Snow.  
  
“Most of the times.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“And I thought you’d too would have very serious conversations all the time.”  
  
“Why would you think something like that?”  
  
“I don’t know. Just a feeling.”  
  
“Nah. Ask Henry.”  
  
“I didn’t. He doesn’t want to tell me anything about you two.”  
  
“Good kid,” Emma exclaimed.  
  
“He is getting a gift from me this week,” said Regina with a proud smile.  
  
Emma leaned over and whispered into her ear: “See? We can raise good kids.”  
  
“What was that?” asked Snow, leaning toward them trying to eavesdrop.  
  
“Nothing,” they said at the same time.  
  
“If you say so.” She looked down at her watch as they stopped in front of the movie theater, and she added: “do you think we are too early for the next show?”  
  
“We have time to get popcorn.”  
  
“Yeah, dad. I was about to say that.”  
  
“You two were almost exploding not too long ago.”  
  
“We walked it off,” said Emma, Charming nodded in agreement.  
  
“I am not even going to argue with you. What kind do you want? I’ll go get them with Charming. You two are going to start to see if you can get us good seats.”  
  
Emma faked a gasp. “How dare you try and separate these two?” she said pointing at her parents and grinned.  
  
“Don’t worry, honey,” said Snow getting closer to her husband.  
  
Both Emma and Regina looked away at that, not wanting to witness the pda that was surely about to come next.  
  
They quickly locked eyes together again as soon as Snow added: “I will find you, Charming.” Those words caused a familiar tingling all over their bodies.  
  
“I will always find you, Snow,” replied Charming, and Emma and Regina were gone.


	21. Chapter 21

When Emma opened her eyes in the next realm, she was immediately left entranced by the magic of it. Okay, she had been to plenty of magic worlds at that point, but this one was different. She could feel magic coming from every leaf, every tree, every bird flying over her in the sky. She didn’t know exactly what it was about it, but it made her feel at peace. She almost wanted to stop there for a while and do nothing; of course she didn’t have that option. She had to get going, start walking to find Regina. That was her very mission whenever they got to another realm, her very first priority. She hoped Henry was still safe and sound at Gold and Belle’s house; Rumple had said he wanted to spend more time with his grand-kid and he had actually made the effort to do just that.  
  
“Hey, you are cute,” she said to a bunny that had stopped to look at her with big eyes. As soon as she said that, it hopped away.  
  
“You wouldn’t by any chance be a talking animal that can give me directions, are you?” she called after it as it was disappearing into some bushes.  
  
“Fine, I’ll figure it out on my own.” She instinctively crossed her arms. “Great. Now I am both talking to a bunny, and I am mad at it.”  
  
She kept walking in one particular direction after following Regina’s instructions on how to focus and find her that way. She had great tracking skills in general, it was part of what had made her a good bail-bond person for all those years, but when it came to a whole new realm it was always trickier than it usually were someplace she knew well. So, she had closed her eyes and listened to her heart.  
  
It didn’t take her long to get out of the woods this time. She had almost expected it to be like walking through the Enchanted Forest, where you had to walk miles and miles to see anything other than trees. But it hadn’t been like that. In fact, not even a yard away from where she had encountered the first animal, she found herself in a small village. In the small walk she had taken that far, she had come face to face with several other different animals: a deer, a few squirrels hiding in the tree trunks, several birds had come down to fly at her eye level only to fly back up. For a moment she had wondered if she had in fact landed in an animated version of reality, just as Regina had suggested it would happen with all the animated movies they watched all the time. It couldn’t have been real, of course she knew that, the animals she had encountered had all been real and looked nothing like cartoons.  
  
She held on to that thought nonetheless; that until she saw someone walk out of one of the houses in the small village.  
  
“Hi.” She waved in their direction. “Hello?”  
  
“Oh, hello. I haven’t see you there.”  
  
“Sorry to startle you.” Emma didn’t know what had gotten into her, only the mere presence of that person near her made her feel at ease.  
  
“Nonsense. You are not from here, I see.”  
  
Emma followed their gaze and looked down at her own clothes. “I am afraid not,” she said almost apologetically.  
  
“Are you lost, my child?”  
  
“I… yes, I am. But I am looking for someone.”  
“Is the person you are seeking a magic wielder?”  
  
“Yes,” she found herself saying with a smile.  
  
“Then you must be seeking Merlin.”  
  
‘Merlin?’ she thought to herself ‘wasn’t he supposed to be dead? Unless there is another version of him walking around in this strange magical village.’  
  
“Actually, no. I wasn’t looking for Merlin, but I’d like to meet him anyway. If that is possible?”  
  
“Of course, my child. Follow me. Merlin will help you find whoever you are seeking so hardly. I can sense the energy you are putting into trying to reunite with them.”  
  
Emma was left in awe once again as she was being directed through a few rows of houses until they stopped in front of one of them.  
  
“Knock on this door three times, he will know what to do.”  
  
“Thank y-” she started saying, but she was already alone.   
  
She did as she was told and she waited.  
  
Opening the red door in front of her was none other that the Merlin she had freed from the tree back in Camelot.  
  
“Emma,” he said with a smile “come in, I was waiting for you.”  
  
“You were? I thought you were…” she let the words trail, how do you tell someone you thought they had been killed by your own hands? Even if it had been under the control of someone else.  
  
“…dead?” he finished for her “I am afraid you have been deceived. I was never killed; and surely not by your hands.”   
  
As he closed the door, right behind it at far corner of the room, she saw Regina laying down on a small bed. She seemed to be unconscious. She rushed over to her, kneeling down next to the bed, hand on her cheek.  
  
“What happened to her?” she asked not removing her eyes from Regina’s face.  
  
“I am afraid that is the one question I can not give you an answer to,” he said getting closer “I found her already unconscious not too far away from here. She had this is her hand.”  
  
Emma looked up and recognized the greenish wand: the Apprentice’s wand. She must have tried to use it to track her down. She must had been able to summon it as soon as she realized what was happening to them in front of the movie theater.  
  
“I need to wake her up,” said Emma in a desperate tone of voice, leaning over, her face inches away from Regina’s “I need to…”  
  
“No,” Merlin stopped her placing a hand on her shoulder “not like this. If you share a True Love kiss now, you will be brought back to your home.”  
  
“You know about the curse?” Emma’s head snapped up to look at him in the eye. He nodded.   
  
“How am I going to wake her up then?” she continued even more desperate then before “I…”  
  
“I already given her a potion to help her do just that,” he said, his voice ever so calm “you just need to relax for the both of you.”  
  
She tried doing just that, but all she felt was distress. The peaceful feelings felt since she had found herself in that strange magical place had already been long gone.  
  
He walked in front of one of the windows and looked outside. “Maybe you can take a walk with me while we wait.”  
  
Emma shook her head no even though her wasn’t looking in her direction. She then took Regina’s hand in hers and brushed her lips softly over her knuckles.  
  
“I understand.” The way he said it sounded as if he was giving her a test she hadn’t been aware of, and she had passed it.  
  
“Regina,” Emma whispered against her hand.  
  
She wasn’t sure if it had been her voice doing the trick or the potion Merlin said she had given her, but two seconds later Regina was opening her eyes. She sighed in relief.  
  
“Emma?” she said in a hoarse voice “Where am I?”  
  
“Where? I am not sure myself. But…” she titled her head toward the wizard and Regina followed her gaze “he was the one that found you.”  
  
“Merlin?” Regina sat up on the small bed. “I thought he was… I thought you were dead?”  
  
“He isn’t, as you can see. I am not sure how, though.”  
  
“Where is the Apprentice’s wand?” Regina asked now, looking around.  
  
“Here,” he said, walking over them and handing her the item “you were clutching at it when I found you.”  
  
Regina nodded slowly, her hand instinctively searching for Emma’s. Which she found a moment later, and squeezed it lightly.  
  
“I think it is time for a walk outside,” said Merlin “you both need to calm your nerves.”  
  
Emma and Regina exchanged a look, then Regina nodded. Emma helped her off the bed and they followed Merlin through the front door and outside the house.  
  
Regina was immediately filled with the same peaceful feeling Emma had felt as she had woken up there not too long before. It got even more intense the closer they were to the exact spot where she had found herself earlier. They were clearly now retracing Emma’s steps.  
  
Regina couldn’t stop herself from smiling at all the animals they encountered in their tracks. Some of them had even gotten closer enough to her that she could have almost extended her hand and touched them.  
  
Emma, on the other hand, had felt how her nerves calmed down the more she walked. It surely had something to do with the fact that Regina was awake and seemed to be fine. But she was also sure the place had particular magical properties.

 

* * *

  
  
Merlin, who had been walking ahead of them the whole time with his hands clasped behind his back, finally stopped and turned around.  
  
“You must have a lot of questions, I suppose,” he said.  
  
“We do,” said Emma “how do you know about our curse?”  
  
“I was there when it was enacted.”  
  
“I don’t understand. Why can’t we remember any of it?”  
  
“As I suspected, I am afraid I wasn’t able to intervene in time. Your memory loss or distortions is part of that same curse.”  
  
“Who cast it?” asked Regina this time.  
  
“Would you like me to help you access your lost memories?” he asked looking only at Emma this time “I am afraid only you were present at the time.”  
  
She nodded taking a step forward, and accepting the dream-catcher he was handing her. He had just materialized it out of nowhere as he was asking her the question. She held on to it with both hands and closed her eyes focusing on what she wanted to see, just as she had done once years before. Unlike that time, the object hadn’t even started glowing yellow, or any other color either. She could feel it under her fingertips that nothing was happening, she opened her eyes and looked at its center.  
  
Regina automatically took a step forward as well, placing a hand on Emma’s shoulder. The moment she did that, the dreamcatcher started glowing.  
  
“Is that…” Regina said as an image of them standing at the well appeared inside it, a split moment later Emma was disappearing just as they remembered she had done.  
  
Emma nodded, hands tight around the object.

  
  
*********************************************************

  
  
“Why did you do that?” she growled at the Rumple in her head “Where is Regina?”  
  
“You are ready to have your question answered.”  
  
“What question?” she asked, launching herself forward and pinning him to a nearby tree. Her hand automatically wrapping around his throat.  
  
“If you just calm down, you’ll understand,” he replied, gesturing animatedly.  
  
She loosened her grip around his throat and tried to slow down her breathing. She didn’t let go of him this time as she had done weeks before. That’s when the question came back to her, the question she had tried to find an answer to immediately after she had turned into the Dark One.   
  
And then the answer to her question came into the form of explanation of events. Rumple had recounted her how Hook had been accomplice to his real life version’s various schemes to try and turn the Savior dark; it went back to even before they had started dating. He had continuously helped the then Dark One, while he had kept on lying to her.  
  
He then moved to Regina: he had told her how, even at the threat of harm toward her beloved Robin Hood, Regina hadn’t given in into helping Rumple in his quest. She couldn’t bear the idea of Emma being turned into a monster as she had been turned by him. His former student had been proven to be more essential to get to his final goal than the pirate could have ever been; so much that Regina had ultimately been used as bait. Rumple had realized that in order to turn the Savior toward the darkness, he didn’t need to make her do unthinkable, dark things. No, all he had to do was put someone she loved in danger just enough that she had no other choice that to succumb to the darkness on her own accord. Even if taken in out of love, darkness was still darkness; he had learned that same lesson himself the hard way.  
  
She closed her eyes, taking it all in. Yes, her question had been essentially answered. She now clearly knew who loved her and who didn’t.  
  
“I never understood how you could even try and date that smelly pirate,” the man in front of her voicing what she had been wondering herself not too long before. He was voicing her own thoughts, as usual.  
  
She felt a deep rage toward her own self now. She couldn’t understand how she had been played like that, and for that long. Okay, sure… she knew the relationship hadn’t been a good one. Or even a real one in the first place. She was using him as a way to avoid her own real feelings, and to try and make her own parents happy. She thought Hook was using her to try and get some kind of redemption, he had stated it himself that dating the Savior would have helped him do just that. She even had thought that he did so to pass the time because he was bored. She had never thought he would go behind her back. She thought they were buddies of some sort; sure, he was a friend she tried to avoid most of the times, but she thought they had some kind of understanding. He was weak after all, even she knew that.  
  
What she was even more hurt by was everything she had just learned concerning Regina. After the recent events, almost sharing a True Love kiss and successfully using her tear to free Merlin, she knew that what she felt for the other woman Regina felt for her in return. There was no denying things like that: True Love’s kiss doesn’t just happened if such a strong love isn’t there. She had tried to use it back when Neal was dying in her arms. It hadn’t worked then even if she wished so much not to see the father of her son go, she didn’t love him that way but she cared deeply for him.  
  
What hurt her the most was the fact that Regina had never told her about that exchange with Rumple. If she loved her that much even back then, why hadn’t she tried to tell her? Why was she still with Hood after that? The day Regina had told her what had happened with Rumple in her vault, she had only mentioned there had been threats toward Robin. She was sure she had never said anything about threats toward her. She would have remembered if she had; especially if she had been told about the fierce way in which Regina had defended her against her former teacher.  
  
She let go of him completely now, feeling lightheaded.  
“Why are you telling me this now? What is the point of all of this?”  
  
  
“Because you need to be fully aware of what is about to happen to you before I move forward with my plan. Of course I will be sure you won’t remember a single thing of this after.”  
  
She felt her body turn around toward the voice on its own accord. She found herself face to face with Hook, he was holding the dagger in his hand.  
  
“I can’t wait for that part,” said the Rumple  clapping his hands.   
  
Hook held the dagger in his direction and a woman appeared in his place. “Ah, Nimue. While I agreed with the crocodile, you are a much more pleasant sight.”  
  
“You can see them too?” Emma asked.  
  
“Of course I can.”  
  
“How? What plan? How did you get hold of the dagger?”  
  
“So many questions,” he got uncomfortably closer “I will start with the easiest one.”  
  
“It wasn’t that difficult to make you grab it while you were busy arguing with your precious Evil Queen. With the help of the other Dark Ones, of course. You didn’t even realized you did so, and that you let it fall as you poofed away here.”  
  
“How can you possibly see them too?”  
  
“I am getting to it,” he said, his breath smelled of rum more than it had ever done in her presence before “you see, while you were busy trying to fight the darkness and find a way to get rid of it, they needed someone to help them. They knew you weren’t going to do that, too good for your own good.” He almost spat out that last part.  
  
“Of course, you had to free Merlin and disappear together for a whole week, leaving the dagger behind in Regina’s hand. Regina, oh Regina, she has been good at hiding it away. I looked for it incessantly the whole time you were gone. She will get what she deserves.”  
  
“Leave her out of this.”  
  
“But she is part of this, too, you see. She has been part of my plan for revenge the moment you have decided to sacrifice yourself for her; the moment you decided to choose her over me. The Dark Ones are merely helping me fulfill my plan.”  
  
“What plan?”  
  
“Not yet,” he said grinning at Nimue who grinned back at him “I almost reconsidered everything while you were away. But then you had to come back only because you sensed her life was in danger. And soon after you had to go and almost share a True Love kiss with her.”  
  
“You were spying on us?”  
  
“I had to.”  
  
“Killian,” she tried reasoning with him “you can still reconsider it. You don’t have to listen to them.”  
  
He laughed darkly. “But this is exactly what I want.” He turned once again to Nimue and asked: “Did you locate him?”  
  
At her nod, he lifted the dagger in front of his face and said: “Bring him here.”  
  
Merlin appeared out of nowhere. A moment later he gave a silent order to the dagger, and they found themselves inside the diner. A further silent order later, she found herself knocking both Belle and Granny unconscious.  
  
“Why did you make me do that?” she protested, she felt all the other Dark Ones trying to take over, but she didn’t let them.  
  
“Be glad I didn’t just make you kill them both.”  
  
Emma shivered at the thought as she was being forced to walk into the kitchen.  
  
“I have been brewing this all week,” he said proudly, looking down at a pot with some green potion in it.  
  
  
He was now controlling her again: he made her step closer to Merlin, only then she noticed the enchantment cuffs around his wrists. She tried fighting him with all she had, but he still succeeded in making her rip Merlin’s heart out of his chest. He grimaced at the loss of his organ.  
  
“What do you need this for?”  
  
“I have prepared myself a dark curse. I need you to crush his heart for me.”  
  
“I don’t understand,” she said, hoping to buy herself some time, her hand twitched around the glowing heart “you need the heart of the thing you love most in order to do that.”  
  
“That is exactly why I need you to do that,” he gestured toward Nimue “you see, Merlin was her first and only love.”  
  
Emma looked at Merlin: he tried to speak, even though he knew they had made sure he wasn’t able to do so, then he nodded.  
  
“Now if you’ll stop fighting back against my orders.”  
  
“Killian, you don’t have to do this this way.”  
  
“You are right,” he said, making her put Merlin’s heart back in its place “I will never fulfill my revenge this way.”  
  
She almost sighed in relief, when he looked at Nimue and asked her: “Is our plan still in place?”  
  
At her nod, he brought his hand to his own chest and ripped his own heart now. “To fulfill my revenge I have to crush the heart of the thing I love the most. And there is nothing in all the realms with a beating heart that I love more than I love myself.” He closed his fist around his mostly blackened heart, reducing it to dust; a blink later he was falling on the ground.  
She gasped in surprise at the scene, but then thinking quickly she turned around to removed the cuffs off Merlin’s wrists. That was the last thing she did before she fell unconscious on the ground as the curse started to fill the room.  
  
The next time she came to her senses, she found herself laying on the dinner’s floor, she had the dagger in her hand. She let it go, disgusted at the memory of what she thought she had just been forced to do to Merlin.   
  
She saw her family laying all around her, Belle and Granny were at one of the booths instead. She rushed to Henry and checked his pulse, relieved that she found a steady one. She did the same thing to Regina, laying not too far away from him, she stopped to brush her fingertips against the other woman’s cheek after she had been sure she was breathing. She then checked that everyone else was okay, before she started panicking. She had to get rid of the other Dark Ones, of her own darkness. She couldn’t risk putting her family in danger again. That’s when she reminded of the vision had in Camelot; she poofed herself and the dagger away soon after.

  
  
*********************************************************

  
  
  
“Son of a -”  said Regina, her voice filled with rage, as Emma was dropping the dream-catcher on the floor as if it had been on fire. She felt her shake under her touch.  
  
“I suppose you got to the moment the curse was enacted?” he asked.  
  
Emma nodded, her gaze still fixed on the magical object at her feet. Both the memory and the glowing were gone by then, but she couldn’t look away.  
  
Regina moved her hand from her arm to her back and started to move it in a circular motion. At this touch, she felt her muscles relax just slightly.  
  
“I tried to interfere before the curse hit me as well,” he was saying now “but I gather I haven’t been completely successful in my attempt.”  
  
“Where did you go next?” asked Regina.  
  
“I woke up on the same spot where the building had been before I fell unconscious. I tried to find a way to warn you, but I found myself unable to do so.”  
  
“What do you mean?” Regina was the one still asking the questions, still massaging Emma’s back.  
  
“The curse hasn’t been enacted as it had been originally planned. Something went wrong and other people who share True Love have been affected by it, even if not to the same degree as you two. You must have noticed that by now. I guess my partner and I got hit by it just as much by proximity.”  
  
Emma finally looked up at that. “You never mentioned a partner in Camelot. When we were talking about ways to get rid of the darkness, and I asked you if you had ever experienced True Love.”  
  
“I apologize for that. When you asked me that question, I wasn’t sure if it was coming from you or from Nimue. I was afraid of naming them in front of you, in case they’d try and hurt them.”  
  
“I thought you had been trapped in the tree for centuries,” Regina pointed out.  
  
“I did. They were the only person that had visited me on a regular basis, we connected on a spiritual level. When the curse was enacted, I didn’t remember them. Then we found each other again. Before that, I only suspected we shared True Love.”  
  
“Do you have any idea what was the plan Hook and the Dark Ones had set in motion?”  
  
“I only know part of it,” he started “I know Hook’s intend had been to keep you two apart. He set a phrase as a trigger, something that he knew would always work to try and keep you separated.”  
  
“What my parents always tell each other,” said Emma, not daring to utter those words.  
  
“Yes. I see you have figured that part out on your own.” He smiled, showing those dimples half her family swooned over.  
  
“We witnessed the two idiots say that just before we got transported here. Do those words have magic powers now?”  
  
“In a way. Hook knew her parents’ catchphrase well enough to know they would keep using it. What he hadn’t taken into consideration was how different the relationship you two have from the one Snow and Charming have.”  
  
“In what way?”  
  
“While both relationships are based on deep love, yours is more about actions and showing the other how you feel rather than put it into words all the time. Snow and Charming do have that, but they enjoy reminding the other that nothing can keep them apart.”  
  
“I am sure my parents have said those words to one another more than one time a month?!”  
  
“I am sure they have as well,” Merlin agreed “but that’s where what Hook didn’t expect came into play. It took longer for the curse to recharge itself because your relationship was growing stronger and stronger by contrast, the opposite of what he was trying to accomplish.”  
  
“Why the six months gap then?” Emma had a lot of questions floating around in her brain.  
  
“You will have to ask your parents about that.”  
  
“How do we stop the curse?”  
  
“I can’t tell you the exact way to do that,” he said looking at Regina “but I can tell you you are closer than you think. There is one thing I can tell you…”  
  
“… the love you two share is a very powerful magic.”  
  
“Isn’t all True Love supposed to be magic?” asked Regina with a raised eyebrow. She had been told that all of her life.  
  
“Yes and no.”  
  
“Meaning?”  
  
“Yes, because all True Love is indeed something magical, something rare. No, because yours is even rarer than most. Your love actually produces magic, the magic you have been making together all these years.”  
  
“Nobody else can do that?”  
  
“Not that I am aware of. There have been couples, for example, when one had magic and the other could trigger it through True Love. Others where both had magic, but they never combined it the way you do. What I have witnessed you two only today is astonishing.”  
  
Both Emma and Regina shared a confused look, then they both turned their attention back to him.  
  
“I see you are not even aware of what you do.” He smiled. “When Regina helped you bring back your memory by just placing her hand on your arm, I have never seen that happen. Not to mention the way she was able to see your memory along side you.”  
  
“You couldn’t see it?”  
  
“No. What you did, share such an emotional memory with someone else, can only be done if you share a deep love for one another or if you deeply trust the other person. From what I have seen, you have both of those things. Of course what makes your love even stronger is the fact that you both share True Love with your son.”  
  
“Wow,” Emma exclaimed. They had never been able to put their relationship into words, not really. She would have never expected that what they shared was so rare.  
  
“Our True Love is even more powerful than the one Snow and Charming share?” asked Regina with a chuckle. She had felt Emma relax completely under her hand and wanted to lighten up the mood to help her relax further. Not that she wasn’t enraged herself, Emma had clearly been affected by it more directly.  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“I know what I have just told you is a lot to take in, but…” he added “do you have any more questions?”  
  
  
“If and when we break the curse, will we be able to understand what was Hook’s plan?”  
  
“When is most likely. You are really close to doing just that. In regards of the plan, I am not sure you will be able to do so.”  
  
“Thank you for the extensive explanation. And for helping us, both here and in Camelot.”  
  
“My pleasure. I must go now. You know what to do from here.” He smiled, giving them a short nod and poofed away.  
  
Emma and Regina faced each other. They hugged tightly for a couple a minutes, just enjoying the feeling of the other woman’s body against their own.  
  
“You okay?”  
  
“I am just completely enraged at the son of a bitch,” Regina replied looking up and into her eyes “but all I care about right now is bringing you safely at home.”  
  
The way Regina had talked about Hook had made her smile, not that she hadn’t talked badly about him, but it had just reached a new level of dislike. She leaned over and kissed her softly, showing her how much she appreciated everything she did for her.


	22. Chapter 22

They found themselves wrapped with their arms around each other in front of Gold and Belle’s house. Things had indeed started to change, they must have thought of Henry as they were poofing themselves back to Storybrooke. They held on a little bit longer glad that both were okay, knowing full well their son was safe as well.  
  
“Emma, Regina,” exclaimed Belle as she saw them “you look like you just saw a ghost.”  
  
“In a way,” answered Emma.  
  
“Moms? What are you doing here?” Henry said approaching the foyer. When he noticed their expressions, he enveloped both in a big family hug. “What happened to you two?”  
  
“Let them breath for a moment,” said Belle “I am sure they will tell us.”  
  
“Fine,” he finally let go of the hug.  
  
They got into the living room just as Rumple was pushing on his cane to get off the couch and check who had ringed the bell.  
  
“Did something happen?” he asked, sitting down again as he saw who it was.  
  
“Is something wrong with grandpa or grandma?” Henry asked “or baby Neal?”  
  
“No, no,” Regina reassured him “your other grandparents are still at the movies right now, I suppose.”  
  
“Why aren’t you with them?”  
  
They told them everything that Merlin had told them, and everything that had led them to meet with the wizard again. Having to explain people what happened to them when they disappeared had now become both second nature and tiring.  
  
“That sounds horrible,” said Belle as they finished. Regina had to pick the story up a few times when Emma had been too angry to keep talking.  
  
“It was,” Emma replied, her lips trembling slightly. Only Regina actually noticed it, and she placed a hand on her back.  
  
“So, he wasn’t after Rumple after all?”  
  
“We aren’t really sure what he was trying to accomplish. I wouldn’t take off the protection spell just yet.”  
  
“I am partially to blame for what happened to you,” started Rumple “Mi- Emma, I apologize for everything I have tried to put you through.”  
  
“You have apologized already. And you have done so on multiple occasions now.”  
  
“But - “  
  
“It is all water under the bridge,” Emma interrupted him now “if anything else, from the memories I have regained today, your actions have helped me realize just what kind of person Hook was.”  
  
“Your actions were still uncalled for, of course,” Regina added for her.  
  
“Of course.” Emma looked at Regina for a moment then back at Rumple “But you are forgiven now.”  
  
“Fair enough. Is there anything we con do help you now?”  
  
“Now that you mention it…” started Regina. She turned around to face Emma to have one of their silent conversations “maybe you can keep an eye on Henry while we go figure out how to break this curse once and for all?”  
  
“Sure,” replied both Belle and Rumple at the same time as Henry was saying: “Why can’t I help you too?”  
  
“Because we don’t want you to get hurt.”  
  
“But-”  
  
“No arguing.”  
  
He lowered his head, pouting.  
  
“How are you going to do that?” asked Belle.  
  
“We are going to see if we can speed up the process with the help of my parents.”  
  
“We are going to wait until tomorrow, aren’t we?” she now asked looking at Regina.  
  
“Yes. We both need to regain some energy first. We actually better get going.”  
  
“Good luck to you too,” said Rumple.  
  
“If you need anything just call us,” added Belle.  
  
“Henry come say goodbye at the door?” Regina asked him. When she noticed he was still pouting, she gave him a meaningful look.  
  
“Okay,” he said getting up from his place next to his grandfather.  
  
“Are you sure you don’t want me come with you? I can help.”  
  
“Yes,” Regina said firmly.  
  
“Ugh. This is Operation Unicorn all over again.”  
  
“Operation Unicorn?” asked Emma.  
  
“You didn’t tell her about Operation Unicorn?”  
  
“I thought you had done it.”  
  
“Uhmm… guys?”  
  
They both turned around to face Emma.  
“What is Operation Unicorn?”  
  
“It’s the Operation Henry started to find you and help you get rid of the darkness.”  
  
“Wasn’t that Operation Swan? And why Unicorn?”  
  
“That was the cover Operation we used because mom couldn’t admit her feelings for you,” he rolled his eyes at that “and Unicorn because of something mom said when you turned into the Dark One.”  
  
“What did your mom say?”  
  
“Grandma Snow was all worried about what happened to you, and mom got her serious face on, the one she makes when she is trying to hold back tears. You know the one, right?”  
  
“Right.” Emma nodded, she indeed knew what he was referring to.  
  
“And she said something like: ‘she didn’t ride off on an unicorn’ and something else about a vortex of evil.”  
  
“You really said that?” Emma asked looking at Regina “To my mother?”  
  
“Well, yeah… it was the first image that came into my mind into that moment as opposite to what had just happened to you.”  
  
“You picture me riding off on a unicorn?” Emma chuckled.  
  
“Didn’t we have a more pressing issue to discuss?”  
  
“Yes, of course.”  
  
“Henry, we can not let you come with us, but there is a way for you to help us anyway.”  
  
“What is it?”  
  
“Here,” Regina said making the potion he had given him after they had gotten back from Oz appear in her hand “I know there is a protection spell in place. But in case there is anything wrong with it or something happens, don’t forget to use it.”  
  
“Why didn’t you give it to grandpa?” he asked raising his eyebrow “He has used magic before.”  
  
“Because Rumple has decided not to use magic anymore. And I know how much you want to help us.”  
  
“Is that really it?”  
  
“Of course.”  
  
“Okay then. I will do my very best,” he grinned.  
  
“Good,” Regina said before enveloping him in a big tight hug “be careful, my Little Prince.”  
  
He let go of her and hugged his other mother, this hug was just as tight.  
  
“What your mom just said: be careful, kid.”  
  
“I will.”  
  
They waited until he made their way back to his grandparents, then they poofed themselves away.  
  


 

* * *

  
  
They made themselves land on top of their bed, too physically and mentally tired to go to the trouble of walking.  
  
“You gonna text Belle about the potion you gave Henry, right?”  
  
“Yes. Hold on.” She took her phone and did just that. She wasn’t going to let their fourteen year old son being in charge of protecting his grandparents. She had been honest when she had said she wanted to make him feel like he was helping; also about not wanting Rumple to use magic against his will, that’s why she had texted Belle.  
  
“So, how did you picture me riding off on a unicorn?” Emma asked, leaning on her elbow and looking down at Regina at her side.  
  
“Emma…”  
  
“Come on. Amuse me?”  
  
Regina mimicked Emma’s position. “What do you want to know?”  
  
“What would I be wearing?”  
  
“Oh, that one is easy: your red leather jacket, your tight jeans, and your favorite pair of boots.”  
  
“To ride off on a unicorn?”  
  
“You like saying that, don’t you? And yes, I couldn’t picture you with anything else on.”  
  
“I really do. Riding off on an unicorn. What color is the unicorn’s mane?”  
  
“Let’s see… a combination of red and yellow locks.”  
  
“You really have thought this through.”  
“Not really. But it wasn’t so difficult once you asked me those questions.”  
  
“Hey, Regina?”  
  
“Yes, Emma?”  
  
“Will you be my big spoon for tonight?”  
  
“Of course.”

 

* * *

  
  
  
They both woke up early the next morning, and they waited until it was the usual time they knew both Snow and Charming would be awake. They didn’t usually wake up too late, after all. They took advantage of that time to go over their next step.  
  
“Ready?” asked Regina when they were in front of the green door.  
  
“Yes,” replied Emma and knocked lightly.  
  
“Emma. Regina. You are okay,” said Snow. She hugged her daughter, then hesitated for a moment in front of Regina. When she gave her a short nod, she hugged her as well.  
  
“Come in,” she added before they could say anything “Charming, they are okay.”  
  
“I was just about to make myself a cup of tea, do you want some?”  
  
“Mom?” Emma finally said “can we sit down for a moment?”  
  
“Sure.” She sat down at one of the chairs at the table and the other two followed suit. “What’s wrong? It happened again last night, didn’t it?”  
  
“Can we wait till dad is here as well?”  
  
“Charming?” she called out for him again.  
  
“Just a second,” he yelled back.  
  
A couple of minutes later he walked downstairs, his hair still wet from the shower.  
  
“Hey. I told your mom you were okay.”  
  
“You were more worried than I was when they disappeared in front of our eyes.”  
  
“Yeah, but I quickly recomposed myself and then, didn’t I reassure you?”  
  
“Okay, yes. You did that.”  
  
“Guys.”  
  
“Sorry,” they both said at the same time.  
  
They once again had to repeat what Merlin had told them, this time Regina already knew which parts were more difficult for Emma to repeat.  
  
“So, we caused your curse?”  
  
“You didn’t cause it. Your were just used as part of it. Or well, your catchphrase.”  
  
“Does that mean we can’t say it anymore?”  
  
“That’s what we came here to tell you,” said Regina “we need you to help us get transported again. We need to find what we need to break the curse.”  
  
“Do you know what that is?”  
  
“No, not yet. But Merlin assured us that we are really close.”  
  
“Do you want us to do that right now?”  
  
“In a moment,” said Emma “there is something I have to ask you first.”  
  
“You can ask us anything.”  
  
“Okay. Merlin said the more you said your catchphrase to each other, the more the curse charged, so that’s why we were being poofed away every month. Why was there a six month gap?”  
  
“When was that again?”  
  
“August through February.”  
  
“Oh.” They exchanged a look. “We know what happened there.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Remember how I told you your mother and I didn’t let other things get in our way?”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Well, after you brought back the fact that we could have come and get you when you were a kid, I didn’t remember any of it at first. Then I did. I remembered that I was against going back to sleep, to the curse. I wanted to come to you. Ultimately your mom convinced me.”  
  
“We hit a few bumps here and there, too.”  
  
“Yeah, we didn’t really fight, but we must have been our usual selves a bit less than usual.”  
  
“You are good now, right?”  
  
“Yes, honey.”  
  
If it hadn’t been for Emma’s smile, Regina would have rolled her eyes at the scene.  
  
“Now, could you help us?”  
  
The first time they repeated ‘I will find you. I will always find you,’ nothing had happened. At the third time, Regina was already starting to sound annoying.  
  
“Come on, you two. More enthusiasm,” she said, felling like she was directing a movie.  
  
“It doesn’t come natural right now.”  
  
“Okay.” She rolled up her sleeves as Emma looked at them in amusement “I just took hostage your precious little Charming.”  
  
“Regina!”  
  
“Who are you calling little?”  
  
“Focus you two,” Regina said in her best Evil Queen’s voice “I am just setting up the mood for you.”  
  
“Where was I? I just took Charming hostage. I am dragging him away, while I am locking you in a cell. There is no escape. What do you say to each other?”  
  
“Don’t worry Charming, I will find you.”  
  
“I will always find you, Snow.”  
  
That was it: with actual tears running down their cheeks, they both said those words as they were actually being separated. Regina didn’t have time to feel sorry for what she had to do, when her and Emma got poofed away.  
  


 

* * *

  
  
Regina found herself standing in the middle of Main Street. At least that’s where she thought she was, even though the sky was unusually red.  
  
“Someone finally killed you.”   
  
A cold chill ran down her spine as she recognized the voice. “Zelena? Where are we?”  
  
“The Underworld, of course. Tell me it was your precious little Savior that did it. Tell me she has gotten tired of you and snapped.”  
  
“I am only joking,” she added immediately, pursing her lips “I have been observing you, I know you still have a pulse and everything.”  
  
“You twisted witch,” Regina spat out.  
  
“Do you really think you are in any position to insult me?”  
  
“Why? Do you run the place?”  
  
“In a matter of speaking. Darling look who showed up,” she said to no-one in particular, but a moment later a man showed up at her side.  
  
“Too bad she isn’t dead. Not yet, at least.”  
  
Regina tried to summon a fireball in her hand, when Zelena with a flick of hers put an enchanted cuff on her wrist.  
  
“What makes you think you can just attack me?”  
  
“What do you want from me?”  
  
“Did you come here to make sure that filthy pirate was actually dead?” she answered with a question of her own.  
  
“Hook is here?”  
  
“Was, to be precise.”  
  
Regina widened her eyes at the idea of Hook having come back to life and potentially being able to hurt Henry at home.  
  
“Don’t worry. I didn’t mean he is alive,” Zelena laughed darkly “Well, you should worry, but only because I am going to hurt you.”  
  
“What have you done with him? And who is your friend?”  
  
“Friend?” the man brought Zelena close and kissed her “The man is Hades, we are in love.”  
  
“You in love?” Regina snorted.  
  
“What’s wrong with that? We share True Love too, if you must know.”  
  
Regina snorted again. “You haven’t answered my other question.”  
  
“Someone wants a bed time story,” Hades said “or perhaps we should call it a death time story?”  
  
“Oh, I like that. I am using it next time,” said Zelena “and yes, you are right.”  
  
“Please, I can’t stomach the idea of hearing you talk for too long. I am already getting sick at the sound of your voice,” Regina said, hoping that reverse psychology would give her time to think of an escape.  
  
“Just for that, I am making my story as detailed as possible.”  
  
Regina looked down feigning desperation, she was actual trying to hide a smile. If she hadn’t mentioned Hook, she would have tried harder to find a way out. Maybe this was the final step Merlin had been talking about.  
  
“Where to start?” Zelena tapped her finger against her chin.  
  
“At the beginning, of course, my darling.”   
  
“Of course,” she agreed “when Rumple finally got his hands on me and was able to kill me in my cell. Thank you for that, sis, by the way.”  
  
“You are welcome,” Regina replied ironically.  
  
“Oh, shut up,” she waved a hand and silenced her “that’s better!”  
  
“Where was I? Yes, when I was killed, thanks to you heroes, I got here to the Underworld.”  
  
“Why does it look exactly like Storybrooke you may ask?” added Hades than laughed “of course right now you can’t ask anything, but you might have. I wanted to give your sister everything she wanted, and everything she wanted was everything you had.”  
  
“Half-sister, please,” Zelena corrected him “We had met before, when I was younger. We had fallen in love then and we have fallen in love a second time the moment we saw each other again.”  
  
“We shared a True Love kiss that made my heart start ticking again. I was finally free of this place, but then I didn’t have my powers to bring Zelena back to life with me.”  
  
“And he had no more power to exchange my life for another. Then Hook came into the picture: he told us all about the Dark Ones’ plan. They were going to bring all you heroes here in exchange for their lives. What was one more life to me? Nothing. He promised they would help me as well. And we also had another goal in common: we both wanted to get back to Storybrooke to get rid of Rumple once and for all. He wanted to fulfill his original revenge; I wanted to repay him for killing me. I am still going to do that, of course.”  
  
“Now you are thinking, ‘but my precious Savior got rid of the Dark Ones,’ and yes, she did. Hook at that point begged us to still be patient. He promised us you and Emma would come here as soon as you had figured out what was happening to you. He was right, I have to give him that. He even tried to offer us sexual favors.”  
  
“He was really good in bed, I have to admit. So submissive,” Hades pointed out.  
  
“You are not wrong,” Zelena pointed a finger at him and Regina felt queasy “He soon became too annoying to deal with.”  
  
“He kept saying how he had made a deal with the devil, even though I repeatedly reminded him that I was not the devil.” Hades’ hair turned into flames.  
  
“Of course I had to push him in the river of lost souls,” said Zelena “since Hades couldn’t risk stopping his heart again.”  
  
“She ultimately did us both a favor, now we need to exchange only one life for hers.”  
  
Regina didn’t like what they were saying, but she liked that she was still talking instead of taking matters in her own hands. Her half sister almost reminded her of Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons when he talked so much that he couldn’t bring his plans to completion. She was hoping really hard that was the case for her as well. She even had almost the same hair color and she was almost expecting her to burst into song. Maybe her and Hades would sing a duet. Anything was a better picture compared to imaging what they had just told her they did with Hook.  
  
“Am I boring you?” Zelena asked with a flick of her own hand giving her back her voice.  
  
“You want to kill me so you want to exchange your life for mine. Is that what you are getting at?”  
  
“Where is the plot twist in that?” she asked, grabbing something from her pocket “recognize this?”  
  
Regina widened her eyes at the sight of the Apprentice’s wand broke in two halves in her hands.  
  
“I caught a thief trying to break into my Town-hall, and I thought she was a hero now. A Savior.”  
  
“What have you done to Emma?”  
  
“You see, someone else would think that the best revenge would be killing you,” she said with a dismissive gesture “but I must disagree: the best revenge would be making you live without your precious Savior. I am going to enjoy looking you despair between wanting to be with her and not wanting to leave your son behind.”  
  
“Darling?” she told Hades and he made a lighting bolt appear in his hand “I knew this thing stolen from your brother would come in handy one day.”  
  
“Ready to see your love die in front of your eyes?” she asked and with a flick of her hand she made Emma appear next to Regina. She had an enchantment cuff on her wrist as well, “And when I say in front of your eyes, I mean literally.”  
  
“Don’t you dare,” said Regina.  
  
“I am already daring.”  
  
“I am going to make your life a living hell, this place is going to look like an amusement park.”  
  
“This is not hell,” screamed Hades, his hair aflame again. Overtaken by his own rage, he threw the light bolt in his hand directly toward Emma.  
  
Regina noticing that just in time, she quickly jumped in front of her girlfriend. The lighting bolt hitting her right in the middle of her chest, making her fall backwards. Emma caught her falling in her arms.  
  
At the same time as Regina was falling, Hades fell down on the ground as well. Zelena was placing a ear to his chest, to listen for a heart beat.  
  
Taking advantage of the situation, Emma cradled Regina in her arms; she placed her hand on her burnt skin and healed it. She  then brushed her fingertips along her jaw before she placed a kiss on her lips. Luckily for them, their combined magic had been as powerful as Merlin had told them it was. Not even the two enchantment cuffs together could prevent them from sharing True Love’s kiss.  
  


*********************************************************

  
  
Regina found herself sitting in an unfamiliar house; sitting in front of her at the other side of the table was Merlin.  
  
“Welcome,” he said with a smile “I have been waiting for you.”  
  
“Am I…” she started “Am I dead?”  
  
“No, you are not. And before you ask, neither am I.”  
  
“How did I get here? Where is Emma?”  
  
“There will be time for that later. Now, I need you to listen to me very carefully.”  
  
Regina nodded slowly, still confused. One minute she was standing in front of a movie theater with Emma and the two idiots, the next she was talking to a man everyone thought was dead. By now she should have been over the fact that people weren’t as dead as she had thought they were. Or, well, not dead in the first place. She had recently met Marian; and had seen Lancelot again, he had been presumed dead as well for a while.  
  
“There is a way to break the curse, the curse burdening you and Emma.”  
  
“You know about the curse?”  
  
“Yes. And I know how to break it as well. It won’t be easy, but it is the only way to do so.”  
  
“How?”  
  
“There will be a time when Emma’s life will be put in grave danger. A time when all you can do is sacrifice your life for hers.”  
  
“That’s what I have to do to stop this curse? I have to sacrifice my life in order to save Emma?”  
  
“Yes. But don’t worry, you will be brought back immediately by Emma’s True Love’s kiss.”  
  
“And you are sure this is going to work?”  
  
“Yes. The curse has been created to be broken the moment you and Emma were both dead. Hook wanted to kill you two, and at the same time he wanted your lives in exchange for the Dark Ones’. Emma has already, even if momentarily, died the moment she stabbed herself with the dagger, weakening the curse considerably.”  
  
“Now it is my turn to die.” Regina was still processing everything, but she was determined. Of course she was going to do everything in her power to save Emma’s life, especially if it meant getting rid of the curse as well.  
  
“Remember, just as you didn’t know about Emma’s intention of stabbing herself in order to protect you and your son, Emma must not know about you having to safe her life.”  
  
“I… I can’t keep such a secret from Emma. She will see right through me,” Regina protested.  
  
“There is no other way.”  
  
“Then you need to erase my memory of this conversation. I can’t keep that from Emma,” she repeated.  
  
“How will you know what to do?” he asked puzzled.  
  
“I will know. I will always do anything in my power to protect Emma.”  
  
 “You are sure then?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Lay down on that bed then,” he said pointing at the small bed at the far end corner of the room.  
  
Regina did as she was told, Merlin was walking behind her. He knelt down next to her, and raised his hand. As he did so, there was three soft knocks at the door.  
  
“You will be unconscious for a couple of minutes. When you will wake up again, you will have no memory of this,” he whispered, gently placing the back of his hand against her forehead.  
  
Her eyes rolled back as she passed out.  
  


*********************************************************

  
  
“Regina,” Emma was calling for her while she shook her, she was still cradling her in her arms i the middle of Main Street. Not the one with the red tinted sky, but the one in their Storybrooke.  
  
“Emma,” Regina whispered, finally opening her eyes.  
  
“Emma,” she repeated, she reached out with her hand and caressed her cheek “We did it. We broke the curse.”  
  
“Oh god, Regina,” she wrapped her arms around her and brought her closer “I thought I had lost you for good this time.”  
  
“Never,” she said locking her eyes with green watery ones.  
  
“Moms.” Henry came running toward them. He stopped a few feet away from them, his breath heavy. He placed one hand on his knee, with the other he was holding a book.  
  
They realized it was similar to his Storybook as he handed it to them.  
  
“I found this in grandpa’s library. Look,” he said before sitting on the floor next to them “there was too much kissing for my own taste, but look.”  
  
Emma and Regina readjusted themselves in order for the book to fall on both of their laps, then they opened it. There they found their entire love story: it went from the moment Henry had brought Emma to Storybrooke, and it ended at an image of them sharing a True Love kiss moments before. They noticed how there were plenty of empty pages after.  
  
“I was looking through their books, when I noticed this. Grandpa didn’t even know it was there. I was going through it, trying to avoid all the kisses. There were  a lot of those, but anyway… I was going through it when it flipped to that on its own.” He pointed at the last image.  
  
“That’s when you ran over here?”  
  
“Yes. I listened to you this time. I didn’t steal any of your potions or tried anything like that. I was simply looking at some books.”  
  
“That’s okay, kid.”  
  
They all got up at the same time and hugged as tightly as ever.  
  
“Do you realize today is exactly a year since you two shared your first True Love kiss?” he said “Well, the first one that has worked all the way through.”  
  
“Wow,” exclaimed Emma “really?”  
  
“In all this mess, I didn’t even think about the date.”  
  
“Same,” added Emma.  
  
“I only made the connection when I saw the book.”  
  
“What have you done with your grandparents this time, anyway?”  
  
“I told them to wait for us at Granny’s. I showed them the picture to prove them you were okay, first.”  
  
“Should we go then?” asked Emma.  
  
“Yes,” he exclaimed and started running ahead.  
  
“Hey,” Emma wrapped her arm around Regina’s waist and brought her close “we didn’t do a bad job at raising him, did we?”  
  
“We didn’t, indeed.”  
  
They locked eyes for a moment, a silent conversation between them.  
  
“Are you thinking what I am thinking?” asked Regina.  
  
“I think I am.”  
  
“Hey, kid,” she called after Henry next “come over here for a second.”  
  
“What?” he protested “I told you I haven’t done anything wrong this time.”  
  
“We know, sweetheart.”  
  
“We just want to ask you something.”  
  
“What is it?”  
  
“How would you feel about us adopting another kid?”  
  
He smiled widely. “Me with a sibling? Hell, yeah. Sorry. I say yes to that. That way I can finally have someone backing me up against you two.”  
  
“Whoa. Hold on a moment there. You and your mom already back each other up against me. This other kid will have to be on my side.”  
  
“We’ll have to see,” said Regina with a grin.  
  
Henry grinned back, then started running skipping toward the diner.  
  
“Hey, not fair.” Emma pouted.  
  
“Come on,” Regina wrapped her own arm around Emma’s waist “let’s go get you something to eat.”  
  
When they arrived at the diner, they realized that all four his grandparents and baby Neal were waiting for them. They were all happy to see them. Even happier to hear that the curse had been broken for good. They had to go over everything that had happened in the Underworld, as usual. Hopefully it was supposed to be the last time they had to do that.  
  
Only when they were home hours later, curled up in bed, Regina had gone into details when it came to what Merlin had told her to do in order to break the curse. That night they fell asleep thinking about their next step. One thing was sure: there were going to be no more blinding white lights in their future.


	23. Epilogue

The only thing filling her ears was the sound of her beating heart.  
It was pounding so hard in her chest, it felt almost as if the red muscle was trying to escape from her ribcage. Escape and run all the way up the aisle to the woman who was standing at the end of it, waiting for her. She closed her eyes for a moment, taking a big breath in, tightening her grip on Henry’s arm to keep her balance. She allowed her mind and ears to focus on everything else surrounding her: the low music accompanying her every step, the sound of familiar voices whispering to each other.  
  
After a few steps, she loosened her grip around her son’s arm, and opened her eyes. At the same exact moment, Emma was finally turning around, her eyes locking with hers.  
She noticed how Emma’s expression resembled the one she had had on her face the first time they had met: it was a mix of disbelief and lust. She felt green eyes carefully go down her body and then up again to meet her own brown ones as she slowly approached her. Emma smiled at her, now adding a look of love in the mix. She smiled back, then she let her eyes trail down as well: down the slightly crooked bow tie, the white shirt, and the black tuxedo.  
  
For the last couple of steps, she kept her eyes focused on the temporary aisle in the middle of Main Street.  
It had been the place where they had saved each other’s life the most; where it had all finally started going in the right direction, even with a few detours still in the way; it was the same spot where Emma had dropped on her knee to propose to her. She hadn’t even planned it: they were just walking down the street one summer night, hand in hand, eating an ice cream, and the proposal had just come naturally. At least that’s what Emma had told her later on. It was true that she hadn’t had a ring on her in that moment to propose with. And she had even dropped her ice cream, before her knee had followed suit a few steps next to it, which pointed out to something spontaneous; but she had noticed the question all over Emma’s face at random moments of the day for at least a couple of months prior to that night. She would just stop and stare at her with a raised eyebrow, then she’d just shake her head, and act normal. As normal as Emma Swan can be anyway. She hadn’t tried to propose herself, even if sometimes she felt like she wanted to. She knew Emma needed to follow her natural pace, because pushing her into anything had never done anyone any good; especially when it comes to romantic relationships.  
  
They had been together four years now, three had passed since the last curse had finally been lifted for good. Someone else would have said that it had taken them far too long to take this step, but she had been okay with the wait.  
  


*********************************************************

  
“I can’t believe the kid is going to be eighteen in a few months.”  
  
“I can’t believe he is about to leave the house this fall.”  
  
“Eighteen, Regina.”  
  
“I heard you the first time, Em-ma.”  
  
“No, you don’t understand. He is almost eighteen. I was almost eighteen when he was born.”  
  
“Feeling old?”  
  
“Yeah. A little bit.”  
  
“Awww.”  
  
“I am sure he will come visit us every chance he gets,” she said getting back to what Regina was worried about.  
  
“I hope so.”  
  
“He will, Regina, I am sure. He will surely want to come home and spend some time with his little sister as well.”  
  
“Oh, she will miss her big brother so much.”  
  
Emma looked over at Regina, taking in her watery eyes at the thought of her Little Prince going away to college. The ice cream, momentarily forgotten, running down the cone and on her fingers. She raised her eyebrow, then she let go of her hand and jumped in front of her.  
  
“What are you doing?”  
  
Emma didn't answer just yet, she dropped her ice cream on the ground. Her knee followed it right after.  
  
“Emma?” Regina whispered.  
  
She took her free hand in hers and looked up.  
  
“Regina,” she started “will you do me the honor of spending the rest of our lives as my wife?”  
  
It had been simple and direct, but full of love nonetheless.  
  
“Yes, Emma. Of course.”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Yes!”  
  
“I…” Emma bit her lip “I don’t have a ring.”  
  
“It’s okay.”  
  
“No, wait.” she placed her hand in her pocket and took out a small purple ring “Rainbow gave me this plastic ring the other day.”  
  
Regina chuckled before she took the ring and placed it on her left hand.   
  
“Perfect,” she said holding her hand up to admire it “now come here so I can kiss you.”  
  
Emma grinned and  jumped on her feet immediately. They shared a long and passionate kiss right there, standing in the middle of Main Street.  
  
“Pool wedding, right?”  
  
“You are not serious?”  
  
“Nah, I just haven’t mocked you with that since…”  
  
“…since we did put a pool in the backyard.”  
  
Emma grinned then tried to get some of her ice cream.  
  
“Hey, what are you doing?”  
  
“I dropped my ice cream,” she pointed at it on the floor before cleaning it with her magic.  
  
“And you want mine?”  
  
“We are going to get married soon, aren’t we supposed to share everything?” she pouted.  
  
“Okay, fine,” Regina sighed and handed her the cone “but I am getting a new one.”  
  
“So am I.”  
  
“Of course you are.”   
  


 

*********************************************************

  
  
Now, lifting her head as she was almost in front of her wife-to-be, she caught sight of Snow sitting at a chair in the front row at her left. Neal was sitting right next to her, but there was no sign of Charming. She hadn’t had the time to ask herself why, that her son was gently guiding her toward his other mom. She let go of his arm at last, and leaned over to kiss him on the cheek.  
  
“Thank you, my Little Prince.” She whispered as they were moving apart.  
  
She then watched as he turned around and walked toward the front row at the other side of the aisle. The moment he sat down, she realized Charming was right next to him. She shook her head slightly at what they had done: they had told everyone not to pick a side at the ceremony, and just sit wherever they wanted. The two idiots were probably too worried that sitting together on one side would still have been seen as them picking a side, so they split up. She had always thought the two were physically unable to be separated if they were sharing the same air. She thought nothing could cause them to voluntarily be apart in the same space, but of all things in all the realms, her own wedding to their daughter had been the cause of that. She repressed a laughter, and turned around to face Emma.  
  
Emma raised an eyebrow at her, asking what was so funny right then and there without having to ask out loud.  
  
Regina leaned over slightly, taking the bow tie in her hands to fix it, and whispered: “I’ll tell you later.” She then moved backwards again, as Emma brushed her fingertips over the now straightened bow tie.  
  
Together, they turned around to face Merlin.  
  
During Merlin’s first part of the ceremony, Emma kept furtively looking at Regina at her side. She couldn’t keep her eyes off of her, that day more than usual. She looked like she was almost glowing: she had opted for a simple dress a few hues lighter than her purple magic. Snow had suggested a light blue one, but she had been completely opposed to it. What she had learned later was that it reminded Regina too much of the dress Cora had forced her to wear when Leopold had asked her hand in marriage. Both of them had agreed on her not going for a white dress, it somehow didn’t feel like Regina’s thing.  
She, instead, had immediately opted for the simple tuxedo she was wearing; the bow tie matched Regina’s dress. When she had announced her decision to both her fiancée and her mother, she had received two contrasting reactions. Regina had smiled widely at her, with lust in her eyes. She had seen Emma in suits plenty of times before, but a tuxedo was somehow even sexier. Snow had instinctively grimaced at the idea, then as she saw how happy it made her daughter, she had slowly nodded in approval. She had even managed a smile. By now she had learned to listen to what Emma really wanted and needed, instead of setting her mind on what she thought was best for her.  
  
They had ended up inviting more people than the both of them had expected. Besides the various residents of Storybrooke; which included Emma’s parents, Belle and Gold with their son, Granny, Archie, August and Marcus, to name a few; they had invited also a few other people they had met during their constant (forced) traveling their first year as a couple.   
  
Ruby and Dorothy had driven to town just for the wedding; after spending some times both in Storybrooke and in Kansas, they had mutually decided to settle in in Boston.   
  
They had been able to reach Aladdin and Jasmine in Agrahab; when they had finally been able to defeat Jafar, the couple had a baby girl, her name was Lelia.  
  
Everyone from Arendelle had joined them for the wedding; Elsa and Agni were now married as well and ruled as Queens over their now conjoined kingdoms.  
  
Lancelot and Guinevere had been more than happy to be there; the couple had been living their happier life in the same place that had almost ended it.  
  
Merlin’s partner, of course, had been there as well.  
  
They had entertained the thought of tracking down their doublegangers; but they had brushed it away immediately. Not before laughing at the thought of what would have happened if Regina’s doubleganger was put in the same room as Snow.   
  
As expected, inviting her ex had been out of the question; they were glad to learn that Robin, Marian and Roland were living happily ever after in her former castle.  
  
Now, as Merlin was almost to the exchange of the vows part, Emma brought herself back to the present.  
  
They both turned to face each other at the right time, both simultaneously taking the other’s hands in theirs, and smiling softly.  
  
“Regina,” started Emma, licking her dry lips “there have been a few things over the years that have tried to keep us apart. Quite a lot, actually.”  
  
That last part caused everyone to chuckle. Regina did as well, the difference was that she already had tears in her eyes.  
  
“What I’m trying to say is…” Emma cleared her throat, giving a light squeeze to Regina’s hands, then continued.   
  
“There have been things that have tried to keep us apart, but somehow these same things are what brought us together as well. I wouldn’t change any of them, because they brought us here, to this exact moment. They made it possible for me to be here to share a wonderful life with you…” she turned around at the first row behind her, everyone else followed her lead. His younger sister was now sitting on his lap “and our two wonderful children. I would have never guessed I would have been this lucky. I love you.”  
  
Everyone at this point was either tearing up, or trying not to.  
  
“Emma,” Regina’s voice came out almost like a whisper, as if she was about to share a secret just with her. She wanted to brush the tears off from her cheeks, but didn’t want to let go of Emma’s hands either. She opted for the second. “All those years ago, on this very spot, you told me how I had worked too hard to have my happiness destroyed. Little did I… we… know that your sacrifice was what would have prompted me to realize that I could never fully be happy if you aren’t included in it, if I don’t have you by my side. Thank you for the endless times you have stood by me, fighting against everything and everyone that has ever tried to take that happiness away… our happiness. I love you.”  
  
And now, literally everyone was in tears, they had been all, one way or another, part of the journey that had taken them to that moment. They had seen them slowly, very slowly, go from enemies to lovers; witnessing all the steps in between: reluctant allies, co-parents, friends, family.  
  
The exchange of the rings and the ‘I dos’ had all been said between tears.  
  
“I now pronounce you wife and wife,” said Merlin at last “you may now kiss.”  
  
They both leaned forward: Emma cupping Regina’s face in her hands, gently brushing a  tear off her cheek; Regina placing her hands on the back of Emm’s neck, bringing her closer to herself. Regina’s heels made her as tall as her wife. She smiled at the idea of Emma being her wife.  
All the guest cheered and clapped, as Emma and Regina shared their first kiss as a married couple, while the sun was finally setting behind them. The last few ray of sunshine enveloping them in a golden light, which reflected the future ahead of them.


End file.
